Signification Quotes & Sayings

So who is cruel? You, cruel reader, you are. — Johnny Rich

It is a matter of mere coincidence that there is often a real individual who corresponds with a celebrity, signifies them. — Johnny Rich

In general we are reminded that the word heimlich is not unambiguous, but belongs to two sets of ideas, which, without being contradictory, are yet very different: on the one hand it means what is familiar and agreeable, and on the other, what is concealed and kept out of sight. Unheimlich is customarily used, we are told, as the contrary only of the first signification of heimlich, and not of the second. [...] On the other hand, we notice that Schelling says something which throws quite a new light on the concept of the Unheimlich, for which we were certainly not prepared. According to him, everything is unheimlich that ought to have remained secret and hidden but has come to light. — Sigmund Freud

I try to respect the rules of the silent movies and I tried to make signification to make sense, and also the crew were very good and the fact that we shot in LA in the real Hollywood, studios and houses. We shot in the bed of Mary Pickford, and you cannot be any more accurate than that, so that helped a lot. — Michel Hazanavicius

Among the many evils which prevail under the sun, the abuse of words is not the least considerable. By the influence of time, and the perversion of fashion, the plainest and most unequivocal may be so altered, as to have a meaning assigned them almost diametrically opposite to their original signification. — Hannah More

Luxury is a word of uncertain signification, and may be taken in a good as in a bad sense — David Hume

Marriage is divine in its institution, sacred in its union, holy in the mystery, sacramental in its signification, honourable in its appellative, religious in its employments: it is advantage to the societies of men, and it is holiness to the Lord. — Jeremy Taylor

The central signified, the original or transcendental signified, is never absolutely present outside a system of differences. The absence of the transcendental signified extends the domain and the interplay of signification ad infinitum. — Jacques Derrida

Literary texts do not exist on bookshelves: they are processes of signification materialized only in the practice of reading. For literature to happen, the reader is quite as vital as the author. — Terry Eagleton

Film does not replace language, for it cannot exist without it. Film displaces language, exposes the abyss that threatens to engulf every semantic signification. Film parasitizes language, much as the animal does, drawing into its imaginary panorama that which remains undisclosed in discursivity. Cinema is a parasite. — Akira Mizuta Lippit

Many things there be in the scripture, which have a carnal fulfilling, even there where they be spoken or done; and yet have another spiritual signification, to be fulfilled long after in Christ and his kingdom, and yet never known till the thing be done. — William Tyndale

What is so special about a title? The mode and significance of titles have changed with the change in the lyrical traditions. So these transitions in style and the art of signification are all collective. What has never changed is the author's intentionality in entitling his works. The art of giving a title to a piece of work is entirely conscious. The author chooses, exercises his will in giving a title to his work. — Anuradha Bhattacharyya

The greatest miracle that the Almighty could perform would be to make a bad man happy, even in heaven; he must unparadise that blessed place to accomplish it. In its primary signification, all vice
that is, all excess
brings its own punishment even here. — Charles Caleb Colton

In the example of the navigator, no writing was essential to draw the meaning of observing the object at a distance from the ship. In the real the
observation has been noted and that is enough to give it a meaning, a subjective meaning, a meaning exclusively important for the navigator himself. — Anuradha Bhattacharyya

Affability, mildness, tenderness, and a word which I would fain bring back to its original signification of virtue,
I mean good-nature,
are of daily use; they are the bread of mankind and staff of life. — John Dryden

The sentence completes its signification only with its last term. — Jacques Lacan

L. 151. Chthizos, yesterday. But either the word must have a more extended signification than is usually given to it, or Homer must here have fallen into an error; for two complete nights and one day, that on which Patroclus met his death, had intervened since the visit of Ajax and — Homer

Just as all thought, and primarily that of non-signification, signifies something, so there is no art that has no signification. — Albert Camus

Even if you don't like colours, you will end up having something red. For everyone who doesn't like colour, red is a symbol of a lot of culture. It has a different signification but never a bad one. — Christian Louboutin

It seems to me that it was well said by Madama Serenissima, and insisted on by your reverence, that the Holy Scripture cannot err, and that the decrees therein contained are absolutely true and inviolable. But I should have in your place added that, though Scripture cannot err, its expounders and interpreters are liable to err in many ways; and one error in particular would be most grave and most frequent, if we always stopped short at the literal signification of the words. — Galileo Galilei

Lexicographer: a writer of dictionaries, a harmless drudge, that busies himself in tracing the original, and detailing the signification of words. — Samuel Johnson

When the nature of the thing is incomprehensible, I can acquiesce in the Scripture: but when the signification of words is incomprehensible, I cannot acquiesce in the authority of a Schoolman. — Thomas Hobbes

The world is grown so full of dissimulation and compliment, that men's words are hardly any signification of their thoughts. — Richard Steele

Rather than protecting music as a sublimely meaningless activity that has managed to escape social signification, I insist on treating it as a medium that participates in social formation by influencing the ways we perceive our feelings, our bodies, our desires, our very subjectivities - even if it does so surreptitiously, without most of us knowning how. It is too important a cultural force to be shrouded by mystified notions of Romantic transcendence. — Susan McClary

He is the intermediary between us, his audience, the living, and they, the dolls, the undead, who cannot live at all and yet who mimic the living in every detail since, though they cannot speak or weep, still they project those signals of signification we instantly recognize as language. — Angela Carter

Though words are arbitrary in their primitive institution, yet when once their signification is fixed, we are no more entitled to alter it than to call a tree an elephant; for, being no man's private possession, but the common measures of commerce and communication, it is not for any one at pleasure to change the stamp they are current in; at least where there is a necessity to do so, notice of it should be given. — Richard Kirwan

Laws, in their most general signification, are the necessary relations arising from the nature of things. In this sense all beings have their laws: the Deity His laws, the material world its laws, the intelligences superior to man their laws, the beasts their laws, man his laws. — Baron De Montesquieu

I vote, I participate, I am present, I am concerned - mirror of a paradoxical mockery, mirror of the indifference of all public signification. — Jean Baudrillard

I used to be a gibber-poet. . . . assemblages of appropriated text from cereal box side panels. I'd spell every third word backwards to foreground the slipping signification of say, riboflavin, dextrose, whatever - the arbitrariness of the act is what charges the work with politically subversive anti-hegemonic gender inspecificity. Once you implode the ingredients hierarchy you've eradicated the implicit privileging of the phallocentric socio-economic taxonomy. The whole banana to slip . . . into pro-metaphoric usage is so de-centered you can bet your boots they won't be recon-deconstructing Sugar-Frosted Flakes again till the cows some home to roost. — James W. Blinn

Mrs. Nettlepoint stared. "I couldn't do that." On which I was the more amused that I had to explain I was only amused. "What does it signify now?" "I thought you thought everything signified. You were so full," she cried, "of signification!" "Yes, but we're further out now, and somehow in mid-ocean everything becomes absolute." "What else can — Henry James

Words, in their primary or immediate signification, stand for nothing but the ideas in the mind of him who uses them. — John Locke

Language operates between literal and metaphorical signification. The power of a word lies in the very inadequacy of the context it is placed, in the unresolved or partially resolved tension of disparates. A word fixed or a statement isolated without any decorative or 'cubist' visual format, becomes a perception of similarity in dissimilars - in short a paradox. — Robert Smithson

MISCREANT, n. A person of the highest degree of unworth. Etymologically, the word means unbeliever, and its present signification may be regarded as theology's noblest contribution to the development of our language. — Ambrose Bierce

The words are clear as in the reflection of the world on the water. Therefore write the Word at once, everywhere, from now till your hand is paralyzed, for THERE will be your work for GOD, since you can not work for God in other ways, and would not, & don't know how, or bend that way, from habit, & from talent in the use & signification & arrangement of the Word. — Jack Kerouac

The only names of objects which connote nothing are proper names; and these have, strictly speaking, no signification. — John Stuart Mill

Fragments of a vessel which are to be glued together must match one another in the smallest details, although they need not be like one another. In the same way a translation, instead of resembling the meaning of the original, must lovingly and in detail incorporate the original's mode of signification, thus making both the original and the translation recognizable as fragments of a greater language, just as fragments are part of a vessel. — Walter Benjamin

There is no meaning if meaning is not shared, and not because there would be an ultimate or first signification that all beings have in common, but because meaning is itself the sharing of Being. — Jean-Luc Nancy

Since reasoning , or inference, the principal subject of logic, is an operation which usually takes place by means of words , and in complicated cases can take place in no other way: those who have not a thorough insight into both the signification and purpose of words, will be under chances, amounting almost to certainty, of reasoning or inferring incorrectly. — John Stuart Mill

The laws of Coexistence;-the adaptation of structure to function; and to a certain extent the elucidation of natural affinities may be legitimately founded upon the examination of fully developed species;-But to obtain an insight into the laws of development,-the signification or bedeutung, of the parts of an animal body demands a patient examination of the successive stages of their development, in every group of Animals. — Richard Owen

As he is one, so we call Him God, the Deity, the Divine Nature, and other names of the same signification. — John Hales

In its primary signification, all vice, that is, all excess, brings on its own punishment, even here. By certain fixed, settled and established laws of Him who is the God of nature, excess of every kind destroys that constitution which temperance would preserve. The debauchee offers up his body a living sacrifice to sin. — Charles Caleb Colton

In wrestling, nothing exists unless it exists totally, there is no symbol, no allusion, everything is given exhaustively; leaving nothing in shadow, the gesture severs every parasitical meaning and ceremonially presents the public with a pure and full signification, three dimensional, like Nature. Such emphasis is nothing but the popular and ancestral image of the perfect intelligibility of reality. What is enacted by wrestling, then, is an ideal intelligence of things, a euphoria of humanity, raised for a while out of the constitutive ambiguity of everyday situations and installed in a panoramic vision of a univocal Nature, in which signs finally correspond to causes without obstacle, without evasion, and without contradiction. — Roland Barthes