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.

  92 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

• Every photograph is a certificate of presence.

  Roland Barthes

  Photograph, Certificates

  8 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

• 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

• Architecture is always dream and function, expression of a utopia and instrument of a convenience.

  Roland Barthes

  Dream, Expression, Architecture

  Roland Barthes (1997). “The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies”, p.6, Univ of California Press

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• 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

• A light without shadow generates an emotion without reserve.

  Roland Barthes

  Light, Shadow, Emotion

  Roland Barthes (1973). “Mythologies”

  26 Copy quote

• Who speaks is not who writes, and who writes is not who is.

  Roland Barthes

  Writing, Speak

  5 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

  59 Copy quote

• Every exploration is an appropriation.

  Roland Barthes

  Exploration, Appropriation

  Roland Barthes (1997). “The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies”, p.14, Univ of California Press

  8 Copy quote

• Literature is the question minus the answer.

  Roland Barthes

  Art, Healing, Poetry

  28 Copy quote

• ...language is never innocent.

  Roland Barthes

  Language, Innocent

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

  63 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

  34 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.

  11 Copy quote

• Where you are tender, you speak your plural.

  Roland Barthes

  Speak, Where You Are

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

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

  Roland Barthes

  Photography, Messages, Code

  40 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

• I love you is unsubtle. It removes explanations, facilities, degrees, scruples.

  Roland Barthes

  Love You, Degrees, Scruples

  3 Copy quote

• The Photograph is an extended, loaded evidence — as if it caricatured not the figure of what it represents (quite the converse) but its very existence ... The Photograph then becomes a bizarre (i)medium(i), a new form of hallucination: false on the level of perception, true on the level of time: a temporal hallucination, so to speak, a modest (o)shared(i) hallucination (on the one hand 'it is not there,' on the other 'but it has indeed been'): a mad image, chafed by reality.

  Roland Barthes

  Reality, Hands, Mad

  6 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

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

  Roland Barthes

  Language, Seducing, Wounds

  53 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

• 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

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