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.

  91 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

• 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)

  62 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

• Painting can feign reality without having seen it.

  Roland Barthes

  Reality, Painting

  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

• To make someone wait: the constant prerogative of all power.

  Roland Barthes

  Waiting, Constant, Prerogative

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

  9 Copy quote

• A light without shadow generates an emotion without reserve.

  Roland Barthes

  Light, Shadow, Emotion

  Roland Barthes (1973). “Mythologies”

  26 Copy quote

• Literature is the question minus the answer.

  Roland Barthes

  Art, Healing, Poetry

  28 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

• Every photograph is a certificate of presence.

  Roland Barthes

  Photograph, Certificates

  8 Copy quote

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

  Roland Barthes

  Language, Seducing, Wounds

  52 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

• The photograph is literally an emanation of the referent. From a real body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me, who am here; the duration of the transmission is insignificant; the photograph of the missing being, as Sontag says, will touch me like the delayed rays of a star.

  Roland Barthes

  Stars, Real, Missing

  6 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

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

  Roland Barthes

  Photography, Messages, Code

  40 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

• 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

• 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

• One of the marks of our world is perhaps this reversal: we live according to a generalized image-repertoire. Consider the United Sates, where everything is transformed into images: only images exist and are produced and are consumes ... Such a reversal necessarily raises the ethical question: not that the image is immoral, irreligious, or diabolic (as some have declared it, upon the advent of the Photograph), but because, when generalized, it completely de-realizes the human world of conflicts and desires, under cover of illustrating it.

  Roland Barthes

  Ethical Questions, Our World, Desire

  7 Copy quote

• Isn’t desire always the same, whether the object is present or absent? Isn’t the object always absent? —This isn’t the same languor: there are two words: Pothos, desire for the absent being, and Himéros, the more burning desire for the present being.

  Roland Barthes

  Two, Desire, Burning

  26 Copy quote

• We don't forget, but something vacant settles in us.

  Roland Barthes

  Forget, Settling, Vacant

  16 Copy quote

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