Roland Barthes Quotes

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

The incapacity to name is a good symptom of disturbance.

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

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.

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

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

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

Every exploration is an appropriation.

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.

I have not a desire but a need for solitude.

Each of us has his own rhythm of suffering.

I ask for nothing but to live in my suffering.

My claim is to live to the full contradiction of my time

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

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

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

Frontiers are physical as well as symbolic constructions

A light without shadow generates an emotion without reserve.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Great portrait photographers are great mythologists.

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

Isolation and competition are inhospitable to learning.

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

Flaubert had infinite correction to perform.

A picture is never anything but its own plural description.

Why is it better to last than to burn?

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

Engulfment is a moment of hypnosis.

...language is never innocent.

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

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

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

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

I have a disease; I see language.

Above all, do not attempt to be exhaustive.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Literature is the question minus the answer.

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

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

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.

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

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

... the book creates meaning, the meaning creates life.

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

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

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

Where you are tender, you speak your plural.

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

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

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

The bastard form of mass culture is humiliated repetition ... always new books, new programs, new films, news items, but always the same meaning.

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

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

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

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

What love lays bare in me is energy.

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

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

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

The cultural work done in the past by gods and epic sagas is now done by laundry-detergent commercials and comic-strip character

Writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin.

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

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

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

The necessary condition for an image is sight,

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

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

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

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

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

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.

What I hide by my language, my body utters.

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

I pass lightly through the reactionary darkness.

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

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

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

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

Painting can feign reality without having seen it.

The Text is not a definitive object.

Incoherence seems to me preferable to a distorting order.

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

A creative writer is one for whom writing is a problem.

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

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

Every photograph is a certificate of presence.

The author enters into his own death, writing begins.