Roland Barthes Quotes

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

Why is it better to last than to burn?

Cameras, in short, were clocks for seeing, and perhaps in me someone very old still hears in the photographic mechanism the living sound of the wood.

Thus every writer's motto reads: mad I cannot be, sane I do not deign to be, neurotic I am.

Literature is without proofs. By which it must be understood that it cannot prove, not only what it says, but even that it is worth the trouble of saying it.

The haiku reproduces the designating gesture of the child pointing at whatever it is (the haiku shows no partiality for the subject), merely saying: that!

Through the mythology of Einstein, the world blissfully regained the image of knowledge reduced to a formula.

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.

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.

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

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

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

The Ventoux is a god of Evil, to which sacrifices must be made. It never forgives weakness and extracts an unfair tribute of suffering.

Television doomed us to the Family, whose household instrument it has become-what the hearth used to be, flanked by the communal kettle.

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!

All of a sudden it didn't bother me not being modern.

Le langage est une peau: je frotte mon langage contre l'autre. Language is a skin; I rub my language against another language.

Tout refus du langage est une mort. Any refusal of language is a death.

The necessary condition for an image is sight.

Where you are tender, you speak your plural.

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

The lover's fatal identity is precisely this: I am the one who waits.

A picture is never anything but its own plural description.

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

It must always be considered as though spoken by a character in a novel

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

Literature is that which he can not read without pain, without choking on truth.

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.

This endured absence is nothing more or less than forgetfulness. I am, intermittently, unfaithful. This is the condition of my survival.

Frontiers are physical as well as symbolic constructions

One must turn the tongue seven times in the mouth before speaking.

I have not a desire but a need for solitude.

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

Are not couturiers the poets who, from year to year, from strophe to strophe, write the anthem of the feminine body?

Flaubert had infinite correction to perform.

Language is neither reactionary nor progressive; it is quite simply fascist; for fascism does not prevent speech, it compels speech.

Tout ce qui est anachronique est obsce' ne. Everything anachronistic is obscene.

Great portrait photographers are great mythologists.

When we look at a photograph of ourselves or of others, we are really looking at the return of the dead.

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

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

Fashion postulates an achrony, a time which does not exist; here the past is shameful and the present is constantly "eaten up" by the Fashion being heralded.

As a language, Garbo's singularity was of the order of the concept, that of Audrey Hepburn is of the order of the substance; the face of Garbo is an Idea, that of Hepburn, an Event.

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.

The Text is not a definitive object.

As soon as someone dies, frenzied construction of the future (shifting furniture, etc.): futuromania.

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

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

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.

I transform "Work" in its analytic meaning (the Work of Mourning, the Dream-Work) into the real "Work" - of writing.