Roland Barthes Quotes

Quotes about:

• Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.

  Roland Barthes

  Desire, Skins, Language And Power

  "A Lover's Discourse (Talking)". Bok by Roland Barthes, 1977.

  90 Copy quote

• The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.

  Roland Barthes

  Book, Cost, Birth

  "The Death of the Author" (1968)

  53 Copy quote

• Painting can feign reality without having seen it.

  Roland Barthes

  Reality, Painting

  11 Copy quote

• Each of us has his own rhythm of suffering.

  Roland Barthes

  Sad, Grief, Bereavement

  "Camera Lucida". Book by Roland Barthes, www.theguardian.com. 1980.

  59 Copy quote

• ...language is never innocent.

  Roland Barthes

  Language, Innocent

  Roland Barthes (1984). “Writing degree zero ; &, Elements of semiology”, Random House (UK)

  61 Copy quote

• Am I in love? --yes, since I am waiting. The other one never waits. Sometimes I want to play the part of the one who doesn't wait; I try to busy myself elsewhere, to arrive late; but I always lose at this game. Whatever I do, I find myself there, with nothing to do, punctual, even ahead of time. The lover's fatal identity is precisely this: I am the one who waits.

  Roland Barthes

  Games, Play, Waiting

  58 Copy quote

• Language is legislation, speech is its code. We do not see the power which is in speech because we forget that all speech is a classification, and that all classifications are oppressive.

  Roland Barthes

  Speech, Language, Forget

  33 Copy quote

• Don't say mourning. It's too psychoanalytic. I'm not mourning. I'm suffering.

  Roland Barthes

  Mourning, Suffering, Psychoanalytic

  15 Copy quote

• Ultimately — or at the limit — in order to see a photograph well, it is best to look away or close your eyes. 'The necessary condition for an image is sight,'Janouch told Kafka; and Kafka smiled and replied: 'We photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds. My stories are a way of shutting my eyes.

  Roland Barthes

  Photography, Eye, Sight

  11 Copy quote

• Man does not exist prior to language, either as a species or as an individual.

  Roland Barthes

  Men, Doe, Language

  Roland Barthes, Richard Howard (1989). “Bruissement de la Langue”, p.13, Univ of California Press

  52 Copy quote

• A light without shadow generates an emotion without reserve.

  Roland Barthes

  Light, Shadow, Emotion

  Roland Barthes (1973). “Mythologies”

  26 Copy quote

• I am interested in language because it wounds or seduces me.

  Roland Barthes

  Language, Seducing, Wounds

  52 Copy quote

• All official institutions of language are repeating machines: school, sports, advertising, popular songs, news, all continually repeat the same structure, the same meaning, often the same words: the stereotype is a political fact, the major figure of ideology.

  Roland Barthes

  Sports, Song, School

  15 Copy quote

• The Text is plural. Which is not simply to say that it has several meanings, but that it accomplishes the very plural of meaning: an irreducible (and not merely an acceptable) plural. The Text is not a co-existence of meanings but a passage, an overcrossing; thus it answers not to an interpretation, even a liberal one, but to an explosion, a dissemination.

  Roland Barthes

  Answers, Explosions, Interpretation

  "From Work to Text". Book by Roland Barthes. Proposition 4, 1971.

  10 Copy quote

• Literature is the question minus the answer.

  Roland Barthes

  Art, Healing, Poetry

  27 Copy quote

• In front of the photograph of my mother as a child, I tell myself: she is going to die: I shudder, like winnicott's psychotic patient, over a catastrophe which has already occurred. Whether or not the subject is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe.

  Roland Barthes

  Mother, Children, Patient

  38 Copy quote

• To hide a passion totally (or even to hide, more simply, its excess) is inconceivable: not because the human subject is too weak, but because passion is in essence made to be seen: the hiding must be seen: I want you to know that I am hiding something from you, that is the active paradox I must resolve: at one and the same time it must be known and not known: I want you to know that I don't want to show my feelings: that is the message I address to the other.

  Roland Barthes

  Passion, Hiding Something, Essence

  45 Copy quote

• I want a History of Looking. For the Photograph is the advent of myself as other: a cunning dissociation of consciousness from identity. Even odder: it was before Photography that men had the most to say about the vision of the double. Heautoscopy was compared with an hallucinosis; for centuries this was a great mythic theme.

  Roland Barthes

  Photography, Men, Vision

  8 Copy quote

• The photographic image... is a message without a code.

  Roland Barthes

  Photography, Messages, Code

  40 Copy quote

• We know that the war against intelligence is always waged in the name of common sense.

  Roland Barthes

  War, Names, Common Sense

  40 Copy quote

• What the Photograph reproduces to infinity has occurred only once: the Photograph mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentially.

  Roland Barthes

  Photography, Infinity, Photograph

  20 Copy quote

• Every new Fashion is a refusal to inherit, a subversion against the oppression of the preceding Fashion; Fashion experiences itself as a Right, the natural right of the present over the past.

  Roland Barthes

  Fashion, Past, Oppression

  Roland Barthes (1983). “Systeme de la Mode”, p.112, Univ of California Press

  16 Copy quote

• How does meaning get into the image? Where does it end? And if it ends, what is there beyond?

  Roland Barthes

  Doe, Ends, Ifs

  10 Copy quote

• If I had to create a god, I would lend him a “slow understanding”: a kind of drip-by-drip understanding of problems. People who understand quickly frighten me.

  Roland Barthes

  People, Understanding, Kind

  36 Copy quote

• To try to write love is to confront the muck of language: that region of hysteria where language is both too much and too little, excessive and impoverished.

  Roland Barthes

  Love, Writing, Hysteria

  Roland Barthes (1990). “A lover's discourse: fragments”, Penguin Books

  46 Copy quote

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