Roland Barthes Quotes & Sayings

#1. To be engulfed: outburst of annihilation which affects the amorous subject in despair or fulfillment. At its best, when it's fulfillment, it's a kind of disappearance at will. An easeful death. Death liberated from dying.

Roland Barthes

#2. Flaubert had infinite correction to perform.

Roland Barthes

#3. 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

#4. The bastard form of mass culture is humiliated repetition ... always new books, new programs, new films, news items, but always the same meaning.

Roland Barthes

#5. 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

#6. Incoherence seems to me preferable to a distorting order.

Roland Barthes

#7. The art of living has no history: it does not evolve: the pleasure which vanishes vanishes for good, there is no substitute for it. Other pleasures come, which replace nothing. No progress in pleasures, nothing but mutations.

Roland Barthes

#8. Suicide
How would I know I don't suffer any more, if I'm dead?

Roland Barthes

#9. What love lays bare in me is energy.

Roland Barthes

#10. Everyone is "extremely nice" - and yet I feel entirely alone. ("Abandonitis").

Roland Barthes

#11. Suffering is a form of egoism.
I speak only of myself. I am not talking about her, saying what she was, making an overwhelming portrait (like the one Gide made of Madeleine).
(Yet: everything is true: the sweetness, the energy, the nobility, the kindness.)

Roland Barthes

#12. To whom could I put this question (with any hope of an answer)? Does being able to live without someone you loved mean you loved her less than you thought ... ?

Roland Barthes

#13. 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

#14. It exists only for me. For you, it would be nothing but an indifferent picture.

Roland Barthes

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

Roland Barthes

#16. Despite the difficulties of my story, despite discomforts, doubts, despairs, despite impulses to be done with it, I unceasingly affirm love, within myself, as a value.

Roland Barthes

#17. In terms of image-repertoire, the Photographer (the one I intend) represents that very subtle moment when, to tell the truth, I am neither subject nor object but a subject who feels he is becoming an object: I then experience a micro-version of death.

Roland Barthes

#18. I have tried to be as eclectic as I possibly can with my professional life, and so far it's been pretty fun.

Roland Barthes

#19. The grim
egoism (egotism)
of mourning
of suffering

Roland Barthes

#20. Pleasure is continually disappointed, reduced, deflated, in favor of strong, noble values: Truth, Death, Progress, Struggle, Joy, etc. Its victorious rival is Desire: we are always being told about Desire, never about Pleasure.

Roland Barthes

#21. Writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin.

Roland Barthes

#22. The realists do not take the photograph for a 'copy' of reality, but for an emanation of past reality, a magic, not an art.

Roland Barthes

#23. Boredom is not far from bliss: it is bliss seen from the shores of pleasure.

Roland Barthes

#24. Where you are tender, you speak your plural.

Roland Barthes

#25. The incapacity to name is a good symptom of disturbance.

Roland Barthes

#26. Above all, do not attempt to be exhaustive.

Roland Barthes

#27. Those who fail to reread are obliged to read the same story everywhere.

Roland Barthes

#28. In an initial period, Photography, in order to surprise, photographs the notable; but soon, by a familiar reversal, it decrees notable whatever it photographs. The 'anything whatever' then becomes the sophisticated acme of value.

Roland Barthes

#29. There is a time when death is an event, an ad-venture, and as such mobilizes, interests, activates, tetanizes. And then one day it is no longer an event, it is another duration, compressed, insignificant, not narrated, grim, without recourse: true mourning not susceptible to any narrative dialectic.

Roland Barthes

#30. I have a disease; I see language.

Roland Barthes

#31. A mandarin fell in love with a courtesan. 'I shall be yours,' she told him, 'when you have spent a hundred nights waiting for me, sitting on a stool, in my garden, beneath my window.' But on the ninety-ninth night, the mandarin stood up, put his stool under his arm, and went away.

Roland Barthes

#32. To see someone who does not see is the best way to be intensely aware of what he does not see.

Roland Barthes

#33. The photographer, like an acrobat, must defy the laws of probability or even of possibility; at the limit, he must defy those of the interesting: the photograph becomes surprising when we do not know why it has been taken.

Roland Barthes

#34. It is no longer the sexual which is indecent, it is the sentimental.

Roland Barthes

#35. Don't bleach language, savour it instead. Stroke it gently or even groom it, but don't "purify" it.

Roland Barthes

#36. I transform "Work" in its analytic meaning (the Work of Mourning, the Dream-Work) into the real "Work" - of writing.)
for:
the "Work" by which (it is said) we emerge from the great crises (love, grief) cannot be liquidated hastily: for me, it is accomplished only in and by writing.

Roland Barthes

#37. As Spectator I wanted to explore photography not as a question (a theme) but as a wound.

Roland Barthes

#38. What the public wants is the image of passion, not passion itself.

Roland Barthes

#39. Like love, mourning affects the world - and the worldly - with unreality, with importunity. I resist the world, I suffer from what it demands of me, from its demands. The world increases my sadness, my dryness, my confusion, my irritation, etc. The world depresses me.

Roland Barthes

#40. Isn't the most sensitive point of this mourning the fact that I must lose a language - the amorous language? No more 'I love you's.

Roland Barthes

#41. Literature is that neuter, that composite, that oblique into which every subject escapes, the trap where all identity is lost, beginning with the very identity of the body that writes.

Roland Barthes

#42. All those young photographers who are at work in the world, determined upon the capture of actuality, do not know that they are agents of Death.

Roland Barthes

#43. A picture is never anything but its own plural description.

Roland Barthes

#44. Every object in the world can pass from a closed, silent existence to an oral state, open to appropriation by society, for there is no law, whether natural or not, which forbids talking about things

Roland Barthes

#45. Who speaks is not who writes, and who writes is not who is.

Roland Barthes

#46. I call the discourse of power any discourse that engenders blame, hence guilt, in its recipient.

Roland Barthes

#47. Ultimately, Photography is subversive, not when it frightens, repels, or even stigmatizes, but when it is pensive, when it thinks.

Roland Barthes

#48. The necessary condition for an image is sight,

Roland Barthes

#49. For the theatre one needs long arms; it is better to have them too long than too short. An artiste with short arms can never, never make a fine gesture.

Roland Barthes

#50. Is not the most erotic part of the body wherever the clothing affords a glimpse?

Roland Barthes

#51. Mourning. At the death of the loved being, acute phase of narcissism: one emerges from sickness, from servitude. Then, gradually, freedom takes on a leaden hue, desolation settles in, narcissism gives way to a sad egoism, an absence of generosity.

Roland Barthes

#52. To make someone wait: the constant prerogative of all power, "age-old pastime of humanity".

Roland Barthes

#53. L'amoureux qui n'oublie pas quelquefois meurt par exce' s, fatigue et tension de me moire (tel Werther). The lover who does not forget sometimes dies from excess, fatigue, and the strain of memory (like Werther).

Roland Barthes

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

Roland Barthes

#55. I think that cars today are almost the exact equivalent of the great Gothic cathedrals; I mean the supreme creation of an era, conceived with passion by unknown artists, and consumed in image if not in usage by a whole population which appropriates them as a purely magical object.

Roland Barthes

#56. Every photograph is a certificate of presence.

Roland Barthes

#57. To dope the racer is as criminal, as sacrilegious, as trying to imitate God; it is stealing from God the privilege of the spark.

Roland Barthes

#58. ... the book creates meaning, the meaning creates life.

Roland Barthes

#59. Miseries of a birth.

Roland Barthes

#60. It is my desire I desire, and the loved being is no more than its tool.

Roland Barthes

#61. Today there is no symbolic compensation for old age, no recognition of a specific value: wisdom, perceptiveness, experience, vision.

Roland Barthes

#62. In the sentence "She's no longer suffering," to what, to whom does "she" refer? What does that present tense mean?

Roland Barthes

#63. Literature is like phosphorus: it shines with its maximum brilliance and the moment when it attempts to die.

Roland Barthes

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

Roland Barthes

#65. There are people who think that wrestling is an ignoble sport. Wrestling is not sport, it is a spectacle, and it is no more ignoble to attend a wrestled performance of suffering than a performance of the sorrows of Arnolphe or Andromaque.

Roland Barthes

#66. [T]he more technology develops the diffusion of information (and notably of images), the more it provides the means of masking the constructed meaning under the appearance of the given meaning.

Roland Barthes

#67. That ambiguous area of culture where something unfailingly political, though separate from the political choices of the day, infiltrates judgment and language.

Roland Barthes

#68. The cultural work done in the past by gods and epic sagas is now done by laundry-detergent commercials and comic-strip character

Roland Barthes

#69. Each photograph is read as the private appearance of its referent: the age of Photography corresponds precisely to the explosion of the private into the public, or rather into the creation of a new social value, which is the publicity of the private: the private is consumes as such, publicly.

Roland Barthes

#70. When we define the Photograph as a motionless image, this does not mean only that the figures it represents do not move; it means that they do not (i)emerge(i), do not (i)leave(i): they are anesthetized and fastened down, like butterflies.

Roland Barthes

#71. New York ... is a city of geometric heights, a petrified desert of grids and lattices, an inferno of greenish abstraction under a flat sky, a real Metropolis from which man is absent by his very accumulation.

Roland Barthes

#72. Afternoon with Michel, sorting maman's belongings.
Began the day by looking at her photographs.
A cruel mourning begins again (but had never ended).
To begin again without resting. Sisyphus.

Roland Barthes

#73. The politician being interviewed clearly takes a great deal of trouble to imagine an ending to his sentence: and if he stopped short? His entire policy would be jeopardized!

Roland Barthes

#74. Every exploration is an appropriation.

Roland Barthes

#75. A creative writer is one for whom writing is a problem.

Roland Barthes

#76. 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

#77. I have not a desire but a need for solitude.

Roland Barthes

#78. I encounter millions of bodies in my life; of these millions, I may desire some hundreds; but of these hundreds, I love only one.

Roland Barthes

#79. Any demand is frigid until desire, until neurosis forms in it.

Roland Barthes

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

Roland Barthes

#81. The text you write must prove to me that it desires me. This proof exists: it is writing. Writing is: the science of the various blisses of language, its Kama Sutra (this science has but one treatise: writing itself).

Roland Barthes

#82. What affects me most powerfully: mourning in layers - a kind of sclerosis.
[Which means: no depth. Layers of surface - or rather, each layer: a totality. Units]

Roland Barthes

#83. I waver - in the dark - between the observation (but is it entirely accurate?) that I'm unhappy only by moments, by jerks and surges, sporadically, even if such spasms are close together - and the conviction that deep down, in actual fact, I am continually, all the time, unhappy since maman's death.

Roland Barthes

#84. What right does my present have to speak of my past? Has my present some advantage over my past? What "grace" might have enlightened me? except that of passing time, or of a good cause, encountered on my way?

Roland Barthes

#85. Like man himself, who is the only one not to know his own glance, the [Eiffel] Tower is the only blind point f the total optical system of which it is the center and Paris the circumference.

Roland Barthes

#86. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.

Roland Barthes

#87. I am either lacerated or ill at ease and occasionally subject to gusts of life.

Roland Barthes

#88. In order to satisfy this great oneiric function, which makes it not a kind of total monument, the [Eiffel] Tower must escape reason. The first condition of this victorious flight is that the Tower be an utterly useless monument.

Roland Barthes

#89. Eiffel saw his Tower in the form of a serious object, rational, useful; men return it to him in the form of a great baroque dream which quite naturally touches on the borders of the irrational ... architecture is always dream and function, expression of a utopia and instrument of a convenience.

Roland Barthes

#90. Wine is a part of society because it provides a basis not only for a morality but also for an environment; it is an ornament in the slightest ceremonials of French daily life, from the snack to the feast, from the conversation at the local cafT to the speech at a formal dinner.

Roland Barthes

#91. To eat steak rare ... represents both a nature and a morality.

Roland Barthes

#92. As a general rule, desire is always marketable: we don't do anything but sell, buy, exchange desires ... And I think of Bloy's words: there is nothing perfectly beautiful except what is invisible and above all unbuyable.

Roland Barthes

#93. Isolation and competition are inhospitable to learning.

Roland Barthes

#94. What I hide by my language, my body utters.

Roland Barthes

#95. I cannot classify the other, for the other is, precisely, Unique, the singular Image which has miraculously come to correspond to the speciality of my desire. The other is the figure of my truth, and cannot be imprisoned in any stereotype (which is the truth of others).

Roland Barthes