I’m almost never serious, and I’m always too serious. Too deep, too shallow. Too sensitive, too cold hearted. I’m like a collection of paradoxes.

It is one of the aims of linguistics to define itself, to recognise what belongs within its domain. In those cases where it relies upon psychology, it will do so indirectly, remaining independent.

Time changes all things; there is no reason why language should escape this universal law

Without language, thought is a vague, uncharted nebula.

Linguistics will have to recognise laws operating universally in language, and in a strictly rational manner, separating general phenomena from those restricted to one branch of languages or another.

Nearly all institutions, it might be said, are based on signs, but these signs do not directly evoke things.

A linguistic system is a series of differences of sound combined with a series of differences of ideas...