Signification Quotes

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

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

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

If gender attributes and acts, the various ways in which a body shows or produces its cultural signification, are performative, then there is no preexisting identity by which an act or attribute might be measured; there would be no true or false, real or distorted acts of gender, and the postulation of a true gender identity would be revealed as a regulatory fiction.That gender reality is created through sustained social performances means that the very notions of an essential sex and a true or abiding masculinity or femininity are also constituted as part of the strategy that conceals gender's performative character and the performative possibilities for proliferating gender configurations outside the restricting frames of masculinist domination and compulsory heterosexuality. ~ Judith Butler

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

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

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

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

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

I also think of those daily slaughters along the highways, of that death that is as horrible as it is banal and that bears no resemblance to cancer or AIDS because, as the work not of nature but of man, it is an almost voluntary death. How can it be that such a death fails to dumbfound us, to turn our lives upside down, to incite us to vast reforms? No, it does not dumbfound us, because like Pasenow, we have a poor sense of the real, and in the sur-real sphere of symbols, this death in the guise of a handsome car actually represents life; this smiling death is con-fused with modernity, freedom, adventure, just as Elisabeth was con-fused with the Virgin. This death of a man condemned to capital punishment, though infinitely rarer, much more readily draws our attention, rouses passions: confounded with the image of the executioner, it has a symbolic voltage that is far stronger, far darker and more repellent. Et cetera.

Man is a child wandering lost - to cite Baudelaire`s poem again - in the "forests of symbols."

(The criterion of maturity: the ability to resist symbols. But mankind grows younger all the time.) ~ Milan Kundera

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

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

The tragic style of Aeschylus (I use the word "style" in the sense it receives in sculpture, and not in the exclusive signification of the manner of writing,) is grand, severe, and not unfrequently hard: that of Sophocles is marked by the most finished symmetry and harmonious gracefulness: that of Euripides is soft and luxuriant; overflowing in his easy copiousness, he often sacrifices the general effect to brilliant passages. The analogies which the undisturbed development of the fine arts among the Greeks everywhere furnishes, will enable us, throughout to compare the epochs of tragic art with those of sculpture. Aeschylus is the Phidias of Tragedy, Sophocles her Polycletus, and Euripides her Lysippus. Phidias formed sublime images of the gods, but lent them an extrinsic magnificence of material, and surrounded their majestic repose with images of the most violent struggles in strong relief. Polycletus carried his art to perfection of proportion, and hence one of his statues was called the Standard of Beauty. Lysippus distinguished himself by the fire of his works; but in his time Sculpture had deviated from its original destination, and was much more desirous of expressing the charm of motion and life than of adhering to ideality of form. ~ August Wilhelm Schlegel

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Various sources force us to assume that the so-called earliest childhood recollections are not true memory traces but later elaborations of the same, elaborations which might have been subjected to the influences of many later psychic forces. Thus, the "childhood reminiscences" of individuals altogether advance to the signification of "concealing memories," and thereby form a noteworthy analogy to the childhood reminiscences as laid down in the legends and myths of nations. ~ Sigmund Freud

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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