Top 161 Quotes & Sayings by Roland Barthes

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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!

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Literature is the question minus the answer.

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

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

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

Painting can feign reality without having seen it.

In front of the photograph of my mother as a child, I tell myself: she is going to die: I shudder, like winnicott's psychotic patient, over a catastrophe which has already occurred. Whether or not the subject is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe.

The Text is plural. Which is not simply to say that it has several meanings, but that it accomplishes the very plural of meaning: an irreducible (and not merely an acceptable) plural. The Text is not a co-existence of meanings but a passage, an overcrossing; thus it answers not to an interpretation, even a liberal one, but to an explosion, a dissemination.

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

Every exploration is an appropriation.

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

A light without shadow generates an emotion without reserve.

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.

As a jealous man, I suffer four times over: because I am jealous, because I blame myself for being so, because I fear that my jealousy will wound the other, because I allow myself to be subject to a banality: I suffer from being excluded, from being aggressive, from being crazy, and from being common.

Is the scene always visual? It can be aural, the frame can be linguistic: I can fall in love with a sentence spoken to me: and not only because it says something which manages to touch my desire, but because of its syntactical turn (framing), which will inhabit me like a memory.

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

Isn’t desire always the same, whether the object is present or absent? Isn’t the object always absent? —This isn’t the same languor: there are two words: Pothos, desire for the absent being, and Himéros, the more burning desire for the present being.

Every photograph is a certificate of presence.

...language is never innocent.

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

Each of us has his own rhythm of suffering.

I am simultaneously and contradictorily both happy and unhappy: 'to succeed' or 'to fail' have for me only ephemeral, contingent meanings (this does not stop my desires and sorrows from being violent ones); what impels me, secretly and obstinately, is not tactical: I accept and I affirm, irrespective of the true and the false, of success and failure; I am withdrawn from all finality, I live according to chance.

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

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

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.

Where you are tender, you speak your plural.

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.

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

…the book creates meaning, the meaning creates life.

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

What love lays bare in me is energy.

Am I in love? --yes, since I am waiting. The other one never waits. Sometimes I want to play the part of the one who doesn't wait; 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. The lover's fatal identity is precisely this: I am the one who waits.

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

The author enters into his own death, writing begins.

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.

The photograph is literally an emanation of the referent. From a real body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me, who am here; the duration of the transmission is insignificant; the photograph of the missing being, as Sontag says, will touch me like the delayed rays of a star.

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

Ultimately — or at the limit — in order to see a photograph well, it is best to look away or close your eyes. 'The necessary condition for an image is sight,'Janouch told Kafka; and Kafka smiled and replied: 'We photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds. My stories are a way of shutting my eyes.

To hide a passion totally (or even to hide, more simply, its excess) is inconceivable: not because the human subject is too weak, but because passion is in essence made to be seen: the hiding must be seen: I want you to know that I am hiding something from you, that is the active paradox I must resolve: at one and the same time it must be known and not known: I want you to know that I don't want to show my feelings: that is the message I address to the other.

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

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

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