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Top 25 Mikhail Bakhtin Quotes (2025 Update)

Mikhail Bakhtin Quote: “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.”

1. “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

Mikhail Bakhtin Quote: “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...”

2. “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

Mikhail Bakhtin Quote: “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.”

3. “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

Mikhail Bakhtin Quote: “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.”

4. “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

Mikhail Bakhtin Quote: “The essence of polyphony lies precisely in the fact that the voices remain independent and, as such, are combined in a unity of a higher order than in homophony.”

5. “The essence of polyphony lies precisely in the fact that the voices remain independent and, as such, are combined in a unity of a higher order than in homophony.”

— Mikhail Bakhtin

Mikhail Bakhtin Quote: “Under this ritual act of decrowning a king lies the very core of the carnival sense of the world–the pathos of shifts and changes, of death and renewal.”

6. “Under this ritual act of decrowning a king lies the very core of the carnival sense of the world–the pathos of shifts and changes, of death and renewal.”

— Mikhail Bakhtin

Mikhail Bakhtin Quote: “The principle of laughter and the carnival spirit on which the grotesque is based destroys this limited seriousness and all pretense of an extratemporal meaning and unconditional value of necessity. It frees human consciousness, thought, and imagination for new potentialities. For this reason, great changes, even in the field of science, are always preceded by a certain carnival consciousness that prepares the way.”

7. “The principle of laughter and the carnival spirit on which the grotesque is based destroys this limited seriousness and all pretense of an extratemporal meaning and unconditional value of necessity. It frees human consciousness, thought, and imagination for new potentialities. For this reason, great changes, even in the field of science, are always preceded by a certain carnival consciousness that prepares the way.”

— Mikhail Bakhtin

Mikhail Bakhtin Quote: “The primary carnivalistic act is the mock crowning and subsequent decrowning of the carnival king.”

8. “The primary carnivalistic act is the mock crowning and subsequent decrowning of the carnival king.”

— Mikhail Bakhtin

Mikhail Bakhtin Quote: “To think about them means to talk with them; otherwise they immediately turn to us their objectivized side: they fall silent, close up, and congeal into finished, objectivized images.”

9. “To think about them means to talk with them; otherwise they immediately turn to us their objectivized side: they fall silent, close up, and congeal into finished, objectivized images.”

— Mikhail Bakhtin

Mikhail Bakhtin Quote: “In poetry, even discourse about doubts must be cast in a discourse that cannot be doubted.”

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

— Mikhail Bakhtin

Mikhail Bakhtin Quote: “There is no such thing as a “general language,” a language that is spoken by a general voice, that may be divorced from a specific saying, which is charged with particular overtones. Language, when it means, is somebody talking to somebody else, even when that someone else is one’s own inner addressee.”

11. “There is no such thing as a “general language,” a language that is spoken by a general voice, that may be divorced from a specific saying, which is charged with particular overtones. Language, when it means, is somebody talking to somebody else, even when that someone else is one’s own inner addressee.”

— Mikhail Bakhtin

Mikhail Bakhtin Quote: “The fundamental category in Dostoevsky’s mode of artistic visualizing was not evolution, but coexistence and interaction. He saw and conceived his world primarily in terms of space, not time.”

12. “The fundamental category in Dostoevsky’s mode of artistic visualizing was not evolution, but coexistence and interaction. He saw and conceived his world primarily in terms of space, not time.”

— Mikhail Bakhtin

Mikhail Bakhtin Quote: “To a greater or lesser extent, every novel is a dialogized system made up of the images of “languages,” styles and consciousnesses that are concrete and inseparable from language. Language in the novel not only represents, but itself serves as the object of representation.”

13. “To a greater or lesser extent, every novel is a dialogized system made up of the images of “languages,” styles and consciousnesses that are concrete and inseparable from language. Language in the novel not only represents, but itself serves as the object of representation.”

— Mikhail Bakhtin

Mikhail Bakhtin Quote: “What is realized in the novel is the process of coming to know one’s own language as it is perceived in someone else’s language, coming to know one’s own belief system in someone else’s system.”

14. “What is realized in the novel is the process of coming to know one’s own language as it is perceived in someone else’s language, coming to know one’s own belief system in someone else’s system.”

— Mikhail Bakhtin

Mikhail Bakhtin Quote: “Other genres are constituted by a set of formal features for fixing language that pre-exist any specific utterance within the genre. Language, in other words, is assimilated to form. The novel by contrast seeks to shape its form to languages; it has a completely different relationship to languages from other genres since it constantly experiments with new shapes in order to display the variety and immediacy of speech diversity.”

15. “Other genres are constituted by a set of formal features for fixing language that pre-exist any specific utterance within the genre. Language, in other words, is assimilated to form. The novel by contrast seeks to shape its form to languages; it has a completely different relationship to languages from other genres since it constantly experiments with new shapes in order to display the variety and immediacy of speech diversity.”

— Mikhail Bakhtin

Mikhail Bakhtin Quote: “In shaping that variety in the development of the novel, and in shaping that artistic prose which we will provisionally call “dialogic” and which, as we have said, leads to Dostoevsky, two genres from the realm of the serio-comical have definitive significance: the Socratic dialogue and Menippean satire.”

16. “In shaping that variety in the development of the novel, and in shaping that artistic prose which we will provisionally call “dialogic” and which, as we have said, leads to Dostoevsky, two genres from the realm of the serio-comical have definitive significance: the Socratic dialogue and Menippean satire.”

— Mikhail Bakhtin

Mikhail Bakhtin Quote: “For the prose artist the world is full of other people’s words, among which he must orient himself and whose speech characteristics he must be able to perceive with a very keen ear. He must introduce them into the plane of his own discourse, but in such a way that this plane is not destroyed.”

17. “For the prose artist the world is full of other people’s words, among which he must orient himself and whose speech characteristics he must be able to perceive with a very keen ear. He must introduce them into the plane of his own discourse, but in such a way that this plane is not destroyed.”

— Mikhail Bakhtin

Mikhail Bakhtin Quote: “The novel has become the leading hero in the drama of literary development in our time precisely because it best of all reflects the tendencies of a new world still in the making; it is, after all, the only genre born of this new world and in total affinity with it.”

18. “The novel has become the leading hero in the drama of literary development in our time precisely because it best of all reflects the tendencies of a new world still in the making; it is, after all, the only genre born of this new world and in total affinity with it.”

— Mikhail Bakhtin

Mikhail Bakhtin Quote: “In Dostoevsky, two thoughts are already two people, for there are no thoughts belonging to no one and every thought represents an entire person. This.”

19. “In Dostoevsky, two thoughts are already two people, for there are no thoughts belonging to no one and every thought represents an entire person. This.”

— Mikhail Bakhtin

Mikhail Bakhtin Quote: “This is a profoundly universal laughter, a laughter that contains a whole outlook on the world.”

20. “This is a profoundly universal laughter, a laughter that contains a whole outlook on the world.”

— Mikhail Bakhtin

Mikhail Bakhtin Quote: “In the whole of the world and of the people there is no room for fear. For fear can only enter a part that has been separates from the whole, the dying link torn from the link that is born. The whole of the people and if the world is triumphantly gay and fearless. This whole speaks in all carnival images...”

21. “In the whole of the world and of the people there is no room for fear. For fear can only enter a part that has been separates from the whole, the dying link torn from the link that is born. The whole of the people and if the world is triumphantly gay and fearless. This whole speaks in all carnival images...”

— Mikhail Bakhtin

Mikhail Bakhtin Quote: “But in fact Dostoevsky found and was capable of perceiving multi-leveledness and contradictoriness not in the spirit, but in the objective social world. In this social world, planes were not stages but opposing camps, and the contradictory relationships among them were not the rising or descending course of an individual personality, but the condition of society. The multi-leveledness and contradictoriness of social reality was present as an objective fact of the epoch. The.”

22. “But in fact Dostoevsky found and was capable of perceiving multi-leveledness and contradictoriness not in the spirit, but in the objective social world. In this social world, planes were not stages but opposing camps, and the contradictory relationships among them were not the rising or descending course of an individual personality, but the condition of society. The multi-leveledness and contradictoriness of social reality was present as an objective fact of the epoch. The.”

— Mikhail Bakhtin

Mikhail Bakhtin Quote: “Where there is no passage of time there is also no moment of time, in the full and most essential meaning of the word. If taken outside its relationship to past and future, the present loses its integrity, breaks down into isolated phenomena and objects, making of them a mere abstract conglomeration.”

23. “Where there is no passage of time there is also no moment of time, in the full and most essential meaning of the word. If taken outside its relationship to past and future, the present loses its integrity, breaks down into isolated phenomena and objects, making of them a mere abstract conglomeration.”

— Mikhail Bakhtin

Mikhail Bakhtin Quote: “Prophecy is characteristic for the epic, prediction for the novel.”

24. “Prophecy is characteristic for the epic, prediction for the novel.”

— Mikhail Bakhtin

Mikhail Bakhtin Quote: “Histories are like novels in that they set out to provide more or less comprehensive accounts of social systems.”

25. “Histories are like novels in that they set out to provide more or less comprehensive accounts of social systems.”

— Mikhail Bakhtin

Mikhail Bakhtin Quote: “Dostoevsky–to speak paradoxically–thought not in thoughts but in points of view, consciousnesses, voices. He tried to perceive and formulate each thought in such a way that a whole person was expressed and began to sound in it; this, in condensed form, is his entire worldview, from alpha to omega.”

26. “Dostoevsky–to speak paradoxically–thought not in thoughts but in points of view, consciousnesses, voices. He tried to perceive and formulate each thought in such a way that a whole person was expressed and began to sound in it; this, in condensed form, is his entire worldview, from alpha to omega.”

— Mikhail Bakhtin

Mikhail Bakhtin Quote: “Engelhardt gets to the heart of the multi-leveledness in Dostoevsky’s novels when he writes: “The particular form of a hero’s ideological relationship to the world becomes the principle behind a purely artistic orientation of the hero to his surroundings.”

27. “Engelhardt gets to the heart of the multi-leveledness in Dostoevsky’s novels when he writes: “The particular form of a hero’s ideological relationship to the world becomes the principle behind a purely artistic orientation of the hero to his surroundings.”

— Mikhail Bakhtin

Mikhail Bakhtin Quote: “This relative freedom of a hero does not violate the strict specificity of the construction, just as the specificity of a mathematical formula is not violated by the presence of irrational or transfinite quantities.”

28. “This relative freedom of a hero does not violate the strict specificity of the construction, just as the specificity of a mathematical formula is not violated by the presence of irrational or transfinite quantities.”

— Mikhail Bakhtin

Mikhail Bakhtin Quote: “But histories differ from novels in that they insist on a homology between the sequence of their own telling, the form they impose to create a coherent explanation in the form of a narrative on the one hand, and the sequence of what they tell on the other.”

29. “But histories differ from novels in that they insist on a homology between the sequence of their own telling, the form they impose to create a coherent explanation in the form of a narrative on the one hand, and the sequence of what they tell on the other.”

— Mikhail Bakhtin

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