Top 100 Barthes's Quotes
#1. I saw Roland Barthes's 'Mourning Diary' at a bookshop, and I felt it was like I was destined to see the book. I read it all in one go while I was in the shop. The book was mind-blowing.
Go Ah-sung
#2. What is new about Barthes's posthumous reputation is the view of him as a writer whose books of criticism and personal musings must be admired as serious and beautiful works of the imagination.
Edmund White
#3. All of a sudden it didn't bother me not being modern.
Roland Barthes
#5. 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
#6. My claim is to live to the full contradiction of my time
Roland Barthes
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. What the public wants is the image of passion, not passion itself.
Roland Barthes
#11. A photograph is always invisible, it is not it that we see.
Roland Barthes
#12. As Spectator I wanted to explore photography not as a question (a theme) but as a wound.
Roland Barthes
#13. Disappointment of various places and trips. Not really comfortable anywhere. Very soon, this cry: I want to go back! (but where? since she is no longer anywhere, who was once where I could go back). I am seeking my place. Sitio.
Roland Barthes
#14. 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
#15. Around 6 p.m.: the apartment is warm, clean, well-lit, pleasant. I make it that way, energetically, devotedly (enjoying it bitterly): henceforth and forever I am my own mother.
Roland Barthes
#16. Don't bleach language, savour it instead. Stroke it gently or even groom it, but don't "purify" it.
Roland Barthes
#17. It is no longer the sexual which is indecent, it is the sentimental.
Roland Barthes
#18. Historically and politically, the petit-bourgeois is the key to the century. The bourgeois and proletariat classes have become abstractions: the petite-bourgeoisie, in contrast, is everywhere, you can see it everywhere, even in the areas of the bourgeois and the proletariat, what's left of them.
Roland Barthes
#19. It must always be considered as though spoken by a character in a novel
Roland Barthes
#20. Television doomed us to the Family, whose household instrument it has become-what the hearth used to be, flanked by the communal kettle.
Roland Barthes
#21. I can't get to know you" means "I shall never know what you really think of me." I cannot decipher you because I do not know how you decipher me.
Roland Barthes
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. To see someone who does not see is the best way to be intensely aware of what he does not see.
Roland Barthes
#25. 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
#26. The best principals are not heroes; they are hero makers.
Roland Barthes
#27. Don't say mourning. It's too psychoanalytic. I'm not mourning. I'm suffering.
Roland Barthes
#28. 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
#29. I make the other's absence responsible for my worldliness.
Roland Barthes
#30. The lover's discourse is usually a smooth envelope which encases the Image, a very gentle glove around the loved being.
Roland Barthes
#31. Thus every writer's motto reads: mad I cannot be, sane I do not deign to be, neurotic I am.
Roland Barthes
#32. 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
#33. The gesture of the amorous embrace seems to fulfill, for a time, the subject's dream of total union with the loved being: The longing for consummation with the other ...
Roland Barthes
#34. I think the US and Russia are mirroring each other and they have this love/hate relationship since the Cold War. You feel it when you go to Russia; they admire and hate the US at the same time, and here also there's this mistrust and it's always going to be there.
Sophie Barthes
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. Madame Bovary is timeless. It is not just about the female condition in France in the 1840s. It's not a simple cautionary tale. Emma is more than a character; she gives us an insight into human nature. With Emma, we are diving into the complexities of Flaubert's psyche.
Sophie Barthes
#39. In the sentence "She's no longer suffering," to what, to whom does "she" refer? What does that present tense mean?
Roland Barthes
#40. Physically, the Ventoux is dreadful. Bald, it's the spirit of Dry: Its climate (it is much more an essence of climate than a geographic place) makes it a damned terrain, a testing place for heroes, something like a higher hell.
Roland Barthes
#41. Text of bliss: the text that imposes a state of loss, the text that discomforts (perhaps to the point of a certain boredom), unsettles the reader's historical, cultural, psychological assumptions, the consistency of his tastes, values, memories, brings to a crisis his relation with language.
Roland Barthes
#42. Ultimately, Photography is subversive, not when it frightens, repels, or even stigmatizes, but when it is pensive, when it thinks.
Roland Barthes
#43. I call the discourse of power any discourse that engenders blame, hence guilt, in its recipient.
Roland Barthes
#44. Who speaks is not who writes, and who writes is not who is.
Roland Barthes
#45. This endured absence is nothing more or less than forgetfulness. I am, intermittently, unfaithful. This is the condition of my survival.
Roland Barthes
#46. Great portrait photographers are great mythologists.
Roland Barthes
#47. [Roland] Barthes turned the thable on the author, saying no only the a book needs a reader to wake it into life, but that in so doing the reader becomes nothing less that the author, who reveals in the book's hermeneutic possibilities, releases them and so becomes its own creator.
Robert Rowland Smith
#49. 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
#50. A picture is never anything but its own plural description.
Roland Barthes
#51. 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
#52. Flaubert's famous sentence, "Madame Bovary, c'est moi" ("Madame Bovary, she is me"), in reality means, " Madame Bovary, c'est nous" ("Madame Bovary, she is us"), in our modern incapacity to live a "good-enough" life.
Sophie Barthes
#53. Myth is neither a lie nor a confession: it is an inflexion.
Roland Barthes
#54. 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
#55. I passed beyond the unreality of the thing represented, I entered crazily into the spectacle, into the image, taking into my arms what is dead, what is going to die ...
Roland Barthes
#56. Everyone is "extremely nice" - and yet I feel entirely alone. ("Abandonitis").
Roland Barthes
#58. There is only one way left to escape the alienation of present day society: to retreat ahead of it.
Roland Barthes
#59. Suicide
How would I know I don't suffer any more, if I'm dead?
Roland Barthes
#60. 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
#61. The Ventoux is a god of Evil, to which sacrifices must be made. It never forgives weakness and extracts an unfair tribute of suffering.
Roland Barthes
#62. Incoherence seems to me preferable to a distorting order.
Roland Barthes
#63. 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
#64. Everything began all over again immediately: arrival of manuscripts, requests, people's stories, each person mercilessly pushing ahead his own little demand (for love, for gratitude): No sooner has she departed than the world deafens me with its continuance.
Roland Barthes
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. A line from Barthes she remembered: Every lover is mad, we are told. But can we imagine a madman in love?
Jeffrey Eugenides
#68. When we look at a photograph of ourselves or of others, we are really looking at the return of the dead.
Roland Barthes
#69. 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
#71. What would you do if you ruled the world?" The gigolo replied that he would abolish all laws. Barthes said: "Even grammar?
Laurent Binet
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. There is nothing in discourse that is not to be found in a sentence.
Roland Barthes
#75. The photographic image ... is a message without a code.
Roland Barthes
#76. Now take all the delights of the earth, melt them into one single delight, and cast it entire into a single man - all this will be as nothing to the delight of which I speak.
Roland Barthes
#77. 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
#78. 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
#79. As thoroughly as mankind has killed God, the reader has despatched the author.
Johnny Rich
#80. Those who fail to reread are obliged to read the same story everywhere.
Roland Barthes
#82. Barthes found the exit to this merry-go-round by reminding himself that "it is language which is assertive, not he." It is absurd, Barthes says, to try to flee from language's assertive nature by "add[ing] to each sentence some little phrase of uncertainty,
Maggie Nelson
#83. The incapacity to name is a good symptom of disturbance.
Roland Barthes
#85. A light without shadow generates an emotion without reserve.
Roland Barthes
#86. Boredom is not far from bliss: it is bliss seen from the shores of pleasure.
Roland Barthes
#87. 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
#88. Writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin.
Roland Barthes
#89. 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
#91. 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
#92. 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
#93. 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
#94. How does meaning get into the image? Where does it end? And if it ends, what is there beyond?
Roland Barthes
#95. - You have never known a Woman's body!
- I have known the body of my mother, sick and then dying.
Roland Barthes
#96. It exists only for me. For you, it would be nothing but an indifferent picture.
Roland Barthes
#98. 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
#99. 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.
Roland Barthes
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