An icon has such being as belongs to past experience. It exists only as an image in the mind.
- Jakobson (2004), Pag. 26

Signs (or "representamina" in Peirce nomenclature) offer three basic varieties of semiosis, three distinct "representative qualities" based on different relationships between the signans and signatum. This difference enables him to discern three cardinal types of signs. 1) The "icon" acts chiefly by a factual similarity between its signans and signatum, e.g., between the picture of an animal and the animal pictured; the former stands for the latter "merely because it resembles it".
- Jakobson (2004), Pag. 15