Roland Barthes Quotes: top 100 famous quotes about Roland Barthes

Roland Barthes Quotes & Sayings

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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

The incapacity to name is a good symptom of disturbance. — Roland Barthes

The lover's discourse is usually a smooth envelope which encases the Image, a very gentle glove around the loved being. — Roland Barthes

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

- You have never known a Woman's body!
- I have known the body of my mother, sick and then dying. — Roland Barthes

The New is not a fashion, it is a value. — Roland Barthes

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

Every exploration is an appropriation. — Roland Barthes

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

I have not a desire but a need for solitude. — Roland Barthes

Each of us has his own rhythm of suffering. — Roland Barthes

The grim
egoism (egotism)
of mourning
of suffering — Roland Barthes

I ask for nothing but to live in my suffering. — Roland Barthes

My claim is to live to the full contradiction of my time — Roland Barthes

Everyone is "extremely nice" - and yet I feel entirely alone. ("Abandonitis"). — Roland Barthes

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

Who speaks is not who writes, and who writes is not who is. — Roland Barthes

Frontiers are physical as well as symbolic constructions
— Roland Barthes

A light without shadow generates an emotion without reserve. — Roland Barthes

What the public wants is the image of passion, not passion itself. — Roland Barthes

To make someone wait: the constant prerogative of all power, "age-old pastime of humanity". — Roland Barthes

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

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

The (i)studium(i) is ultimately always coded, the (i)punctum is not) ... — Roland Barthes

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

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

Great portrait photographers are great mythologists. — Roland Barthes

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

Isolation and competition are inhospitable to learning. — Roland Barthes

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

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

Miseries of a birth. — Roland Barthes

Flaubert had infinite correction to perform. — Roland Barthes

A picture is never anything but its own plural description. — Roland Barthes

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

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

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

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

I make the other's absence responsible for my worldliness. — Roland Barthes

Writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin. — Roland Barthes

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

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

What I hide by my language, my body utters. — Roland Barthes

The Text is not a definitive object. — Roland Barthes

Painting can feign reality without having seen it. — Roland Barthes

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

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

[T]he most repugnant bastard there is: the bastard-octopus. — Roland Barthes

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

I pass lightly through the reactionary darkness. — Roland Barthes

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

In this manner , we are told, the system of the imaginary is spread circularly, by detours and returns the length of an empty subject. — Roland Barthes

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

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

Any demand is frigid until desire, until neurosis forms in it. — Roland Barthes

To see someone who does not see is the best way to be intensely aware of what he does not see. — Roland Barthes

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

To eat steak rare ... represents both a nature and a morality. — Roland Barthes

I live in my suffering and that makes me happy.
Anything that keeps me from living in my suffering is unbearable to me. — Roland Barthes

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

The necessary condition for an image is sight, — Roland Barthes

I have a disease; I see language. — Roland Barthes

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

There is nothing in discourse that is not to be found in a sentence. — Roland Barthes

Suicide
How would I know I don't suffer any more, if I'm dead? — Roland Barthes

In the sentence "She's no longer suffering," to what, to whom does "she" refer? What does that present tense mean? — Roland Barthes

It exists only for me. For you, it would be nothing but an indifferent picture. — Roland Barthes

Don't bleach language, savour it instead. Stroke it gently or even groom it, but don't "purify" it. — Roland Barthes

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

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

Above all, do not attempt to be exhaustive. — Roland Barthes

It is my desire I desire, and the loved being is no more than its tool. — Roland Barthes

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

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

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

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

...language is never innocent. — Roland Barthes

Engulfment is a moment of hypnosis. — Roland Barthes

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

Roland Barthes says, That which cannot be named is a disturbance. — Terry Tempest Williams

Why is it better to last than to burn? — Roland Barthes

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

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

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

I am either lacerated or ill at ease and occasionally subject to gusts of life. — Roland Barthes

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

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

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

The photographic image ... is a message without a code. — Roland Barthes

Where you are tender, you speak your plural. — Roland Barthes

The best principals are not heroes; they are hero makers. — Roland Barthes

What love lays bare in me is energy. — Roland Barthes

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

... the book creates meaning, the meaning creates life. — Roland Barthes

The gift is contact, sensuality: you will be touching what I have touched, a third skin unites us. — Roland Barthes

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

The pleasure of the text is that moment when my body pursues its own ideas - for my body does not have the same ideas as I do. — Roland Barthes

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

Like a kind of melancholy mirage, the other withdraws into infinity and I wear myself out trying to get there. — Roland Barthes

Literature is the question minus the answer. — Roland Barthes