Ferdinand de Saussure Quotes

Ferdinand de Saussure was a Swiss linguist and semiotician whose posthumously assembled Course in General Linguistics (1916) became the foundational text of structural linguistics and, through it, of twentieth-century structuralism in anthropology, literary theory, and philosophy. After early work on Indo-European phonology that made his reputation as a young man, he taught for decades at Geneva, where his lectures on general linguistics were written down by students and edited after his death. The quotes below are attributed to Ferdinand de Saussure, organized by topic.