The business, task or object of the scientific study of languages will if possible be 1) to trace the history of all known languages. Naturally this is possible only to a very limited extent and for very few languages.

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Psychologically our thought-apart from its expression in words-is only a shapeless and indistinct mass.

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The connection between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary.

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Written forms obscure our view of language. They are not so much a garment as a disguise.

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In the lives of individuals and societies, language is a factor of greater importance than any other. For the study of language to remain solely the business of a handful of specialists would be a quite unacceptable state of affairs.

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Everyone, left to his own devices, forms an idea about what goes on in language which is very far from the truth.

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Within speech, words are subject to a kind of relation that is independent of the first and based on their linkage: these are syntagmatic relations, of which I have spoken.

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A language presupposes that all the individual users possess the organs.

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In fact, from then on scholars engaged in a kind of game of comparing different Indo-European languages with one another, and eventually they could not fail to wonder what exactly these connections showed, and how they should be interpreted in concrete terms.

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Language furnishes the best proof that a law accepted by a community is a thing that is tolerated and not a rule to which all freely consent.

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