Roland Barthes Quotes

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.

...language is never innocent.

Each of us has his own rhythm of suffering.

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

The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.

Man does not exist prior to language, either as a species or as an individual.

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 and impoverished.

The skyscraper establishes the block, the block creates the street, the street offers itself to man.

We know that the war against intelligence is always waged in the name of common sense.

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

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.

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.

Literature is the question minus the answer.

A light without shadow generates an emotion without reserve.

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

The new is not a fashion, it is a value.

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

Someone tells me: this kind of love is not viable. But how can you evaluate viability? Why is the viable a Good Thing? Why is it better to last than to burn?

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.

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

Don't say mourning. It's too psychoanalytic. I'm not mourning. I'm suffering.

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.

There is only one way left to escape the alienation of present day society: to retreat ahead of it.

…the book creates meaning, the meaning creates life.

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

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

What love lays bare in me is energy.

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

Painting can feign reality without having seen it.

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...?

A photograph is always invisible, it is not it that we see.

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

The author enters into his own death, writing begins.

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

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

Every exploration is an appropriation.

The best principals are not heroes; they are hero makers.

He who reads a story only once is condemned to read the same story his whole life.

To eat, to speak, to sing (need we add: to kiss?) are operations which have the same site of the body for origin.

Every photograph is a certificate of presence.

What I claim is to live to the full the contradiction of my time, which may well make sarcasm the condition of truth.

The incapacity to name is a good symptom of disturbance.

Myth is neither a lie nor a confession: it is an inflexion.

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

I make the other’s absence responsible for my worldliness.

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

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

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.

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

Whereas the work is understood to be traceable to a source (through a process of derivation or "filiation"), the Text is without a source - the "author" a mere "guest" at the reading of the Text.