Top 100 Roland Barthes Quotes
#1. [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
#2. Jacques Derrida is a very important thinker and philosopher who has made serious contributions to both philosophy and literary criticism. Roland Barthes is the one I feel most affinity for, and Michel Foucault, well, his writing influenced my novel, 'Middlesex.'
Jeffrey Eugenides
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. The photographic image ... is a message without a code.
Roland Barthes
#7. There is nothing in discourse that is not to be found in a sentence.
Roland Barthes
#8. 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
#9. 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
#11. 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
#12. When we look at a photograph of ourselves or of others, we are really looking at the return of the dead.
Roland Barthes
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. Incoherence seems to me preferable to a distorting order.
Roland Barthes
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. Suicide
How would I know I don't suffer any more, if I'm dead?
Roland Barthes
#20. There is only one way left to escape the alienation of present day society: to retreat ahead of it.
Roland Barthes
#22. Everyone is "extremely nice" - and yet I feel entirely alone. ("Abandonitis").
Roland Barthes
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. Myth is neither a lie nor a confession: it is an inflexion.
Roland Barthes
#26. 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
#28. 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
#29. 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
#31. It exists only for me. For you, it would be nothing but an indifferent picture.
Roland Barthes
#32. - You have never known a Woman's body!
- I have known the body of my mother, sick and then dying.
Roland Barthes
#33. How does meaning get into the image? Where does it end? And if it ends, what is there beyond?
Roland Barthes
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. 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
#38. 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
#39. Writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin.
Roland Barthes
#40. 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
#41. Boredom is not far from bliss: it is bliss seen from the shores of pleasure.
Roland Barthes
#42. A light without shadow generates an emotion without reserve.
Roland Barthes
#44. The incapacity to name is a good symptom of disturbance.
Roland Barthes
#46. Those who fail to reread are obliged to read the same story everywhere.
Roland Barthes
#47. 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
#48. 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
#50. The best principals are not heroes; they are hero makers.
Roland Barthes
#51. 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
#52. To see someone who does not see is the best way to be intensely aware of what he does not see.
Roland Barthes
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. It must always be considered as though spoken by a character in a novel
Roland Barthes
#58. 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
#59. It is no longer the sexual which is indecent, it is the sentimental.
Roland Barthes
#60. Don't bleach language, savour it instead. Stroke it gently or even groom it, but don't "purify" it.
Roland Barthes
#61. 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
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. As Spectator I wanted to explore photography not as a question (a theme) but as a wound.
Roland Barthes
#65. A photograph is always invisible, it is not it that we see.
Roland Barthes
#66. What the public wants is the image of passion, not passion itself.
Roland Barthes
#67. 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
#68. 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
#70. My claim is to live to the full contradiction of my time
Roland Barthes
#71. 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
#72. All of a sudden it didn't bother me not being modern.
Roland Barthes
#73. 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
#74. 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
#75. A picture is never anything but its own plural description.
Roland Barthes
#76. 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
#78. Great portrait photographers are great mythologists.
Roland Barthes
#79. This endured absence is nothing more or less than forgetfulness. I am, intermittently, unfaithful. This is the condition of my survival.
Roland Barthes
#80. Who speaks is not who writes, and who writes is not who is.
Roland Barthes
#81. I call the discourse of power any discourse that engenders blame, hence guilt, in its recipient.
Roland Barthes
#82. Ultimately, Photography is subversive, not when it frightens, repels, or even stigmatizes, but when it is pensive, when it thinks.
Roland Barthes
#84. The (i)studium(i) is ultimately always coded, the (i)punctum is not) ...
Roland Barthes
#85. 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
#86. Is not the most erotic part of the body wherever the clothing affords a glimpse?
Roland Barthes
#87. The petit-bourgeois is a man unable to imagine the Other. If he comes face to face with him, he blinds himself, ignores and denies him, or else transforms him into himself.
Roland Barthes
#88. 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
#89. 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
#90. To make someone wait: the constant prerogative of all power, "age-old pastime of humanity".
Roland Barthes
#91. 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
#92. I love you is unsubtle. It removes explanations, facilities, degrees, scruples.
Roland Barthes
#93. The unary Photograph has every reason to be banal, 'unity'
of composition being the first rule of vulgar (and notably, of academic) rhetoric: 'The subject,' says one handbook for amateur photographers, 'must be simple, free of useless accessories; this is called the Search for Unity.
Roland Barthes
#95. Absence is the figure of privation; simultaneously, I desire and I need. Desire is squashed against need: that is the obsessive phenomenon of all amorous sentiment.
Roland Barthes
#96. 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 (by the limitless expansion of the ego, by emotive submersion) and impoverished (by the codes on which love diminishes and levels it).
Roland Barthes
#97. Rarely do outside of school remedies work their way into the fabric of the schools or into the teachers lives, and more rarely into the classrooms. Therefore they only offer a modest hope of influencing the basic culture of the school
Roland Barthes
#98. [T]he most repugnant bastard there is: the bastard-octopus.
Roland Barthes
#99. If I acknowledge my dependency, I do so because for me it is a means of signifying my demand: in the realm of love, futility is not a "weakness" or an "absurdity": it is a strong sign: the more futile, the more it signifies and the more it asserts itself as strength.)
Roland Barthes
#100. 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
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