Mikhail Bakhtin Quotes

• The word in language is half someone else’s… it exists in other people’s mouths, in other people’s contexts, serving other people’s intentions: it is from there that one must take the word, and make it one’s own.

  Mikhail Bakhtin

  People, Half, Mouths

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• Truth is not born nor is it to be found inside the head of an individual person, it is born between people collectively searching for truth, in the process of their dialogic interaction

  Mikhail Bakhtin

  People, Truth Is, Individual

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• The way in which I create myself is by means of a quest. I go out into the world in order to come back with a self.

  Mikhail Bakhtin

  Mean, Self, Order

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• All words have the "taste" of a profession, a genre, a tendency, a party, a particular work, a particular person, a generation, an age group, the day and hour. Each word tastes of the context and contexts in which it has lived its socially charged life.

  Mikhail Bakhtin

  Party, Age, Groups

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• In order to understand, it is immensely important for the person who understands to be located outside the object of his or her creative understanding—in time, in space, in culture. For one cannot even really see one's own exterior and comprehend it as a whole, and no mirrors or photographs can help; our real exterior can be seen and understood only by other people, because they are located outside us in space, and because they are others.

  Mikhail Bakhtin

  Real, Mirrors, Order

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• Words belong to nobody, and in themselves they evaluate nothing. But they can serve any speaker and be used for the most varied and directly contradictory evaluations on the part of the speakers.

  Mikhail Bakhtin

  Evaluation, Used, Contradictory

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• It becomes 'one's own' only when the speaker populates it with his own intentions, his own accent, when he appropriates the word, adapting it to his own semantic and expressive intention. Prior to this moment of appropriation, the word does not exist in a neutral and impersonal language (it is not, after all, out of a dictionary that the speaker gets his words!), but rather it exists in other people's mouths, in other people's contexts, serving other people's intentions: it is from there that one must take the word, and make it one's own

  Mikhail Bakhtin

  People, Doe, Mouths

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• In poetry, even discourse about doubts must be cast in a discourse that cannot be doubted.

  Mikhail Bakhtin

  Poetry, Doubt, Literature

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• The catharsis that finalizes Dostoevsky's novels might be - of course inadequately and somewhat rationalistically - expressed in this way: nothing conclusive has yet taken place in the world, the ultimate word of the world and about the world has not yet been spoken, the world is open and free, everything is still in the future and will always be in the future

  Mikhail Bakhtin

  Taken, Catharsis, World

  17 Copy quote

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