Roland Barthes quotes: top famous quotes and sayings by Roland Barthes

Top Roland Barthes Quotes

Browse top 55 most favorite famous quotes and sayings by Roland Barthes.

Favorite Roland Barthes Quotes

1. "I transform "Work" in its analytic meaning (the Work of Mourning, the Dream-Work) into the real "Work" - of writing.) for: the "Work" by which (it is said) we emerge from the great crises (love, grief) cannot be liquidated hastily: for me, it is accomplished only in and by writing." ~ Roland Barthes

2. "...what I enjoy in a narrative is not directly its content or even its structure, but rather the abrasions I impose upon the fine surface: I read on, I skip, I look up, I dip in again. Which has nothing to do with the deep laceration the text of bliss inflicts upon language itself, and not upon the simple temporality of its reading." ~ Roland Barthes

3. "What right does my present have to speak of my past? Has my present some advantage over my past? What "grace" might have enlightened me? except that of passing time, or of a good cause, encountered on my way?" ~ Roland Barthes

4. "The author enters into his own death, writing begins." ~ Roland Barthes

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

6. "The art of living has no history: it does not evolve: the pleasure which vanishes vanishes for good, there is no substitute for it. Other pleasures come, which replace nothing. No progress in pleasures, nothing but mutations." ~ Roland Barthes

7. "Are not couturiers the poets who, from year to year, from strophe to strophe, write the anthem of the feminine body?" ~ Roland Barthes

8. "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." ~ Roland Barthes

9. "I have not a desire but a need for solitude." ~ Roland Barthes

10. "A photograph is always invisible, it is not it that we see." ~ Roland Barthes

11. "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." ~ Roland Barthes

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

13. "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

14. "The photographic image... is a message without a code." ~ Roland Barthes

15. "What the public wants is the image of passion, not passion itself." ~ Roland Barthes

16. "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." ~ Roland Barthes

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

18. "Myth is neither a lie nor a confession: it is an inflexion." ~ Roland Barthes

19. "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

20. "The New is not a fashion, it is a value." ~ Roland Barthes

21. "The skyscraper establishes the block, the block creates the street, the street offers itself to man." ~ Roland Barthes

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

23. "To eat steak rare... represents both a nature and a morality." ~ Roland Barthes

24. "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." ~ Roland Barthes

25. "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." ~ Roland Barthes

26. "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." ~ Roland Barthes

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

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

29. "For Death must be somewhere in a society; if it is no longer (or less intensely) in religion, it must be elsewhere; perhaps in this image which produces Death while trying to preserve life. Contemporary with the withdrawal of rites, Photography may correspond to the intrusion, in our modern society, of an asymbolic Death, outside of religion, outside of ritual, a kind of abrupt dive into literal Death." ~ Roland Barthes

30. "The unary Photograph has every reason to be banal, 'unity' of composition being the first rule of vulgar (and notably, of academic) rhetoric: 'The subject,' says one handbook for amateur photographers, 'must be simple, free of useless accessories; this is called the Search for Unity." ~ Roland Barthes

31. "Hence the detail which interests me is not, or at least is not strictly intentional, and probably must not be so; it occurs in the field of the photographed thing like a supplement that is at once inevitable and delightful; it does not necessarily attest to the photographer's art; it says only that the photographer was there, or else, still more simply, that he could not (i)not(i) photograph the partial object at the same time as the total object (how could Kerész have 'separated' the dirt road from the violinist walking on it?). The Photographer's 'second sight' does not consist in 'seeing' but in being there. And above all, imitating Orpheus, he must not turn back to look at what he is leading — what hi is giving to me!" ~ Roland Barthes

32. "I feel that the Photograph creates my body or mortifies it, according to its caprice (apology of this mortiferous power: certain Communards paid with their lives for their willingness or even their eagerness to pose on the barricades: defeated, they were recognized by Thiers's police and shot, almost every one)." ~ Roland Barthes

33. "...The editors of (i)Life(i) rejected Kerész'a photographs when he arrived in the United States in 1937 because, they said, his images 'spoke too much'; they made us reflect, suggested a meaning — a different meaning from the literal one. Ultimately, Photography is subversive not when it frightens, repels, or even stigmatizes, but when it is (i)pensive(i), when it thinks." ~ Roland Barthes

34. "We don't forget, but something vacant settles in us." ~ Roland Barthes

35. "[Photography] allows me to accede to an infra-knowledge; it supplies me with a collection of partial objects and can flatter a certain fetishism of mine: for this 'me' which like knowledge, which nourishes a kind of amorous preference for it. In the same way, I like certain biographical features which, in a writer's life, delight me as much as certain photographs; I have called these features 'biographemes'; Photography has the same relation to History that the biographeme has to biography." ~ Roland Barthes

36. "I think that cars today are almost the exact equivalent of the great Gothic cathedrals; I mean the supreme creation of an era, conceived with passion by unknown artists, and consumed in image if not in usage by a whole population which appropriates them as a purely magical object." ~ Roland Barthes

37. "The Winter Photograph was my Ariadne, not because it would help me discover a secret thing (monster or treasure), but because it would tell me what constituted that thread which drew me toward Photography. I had understood that henceforth I must interrogate the evidence of Photography, not from the viewpoint of pleasure, but in relation to what we romantically call love and death." ~ Roland Barthes

38. "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...?" ~ Roland Barthes

39. "To know that one does not write for the other, to know that these things I am going to write will never cause me to be loved by the one I love (the other), to know that writing compensates for nothing, sublimates nothing, that it is precisely there where you are not--this is the beginning of writing." ~ Roland Barthes

40. "When we define the Photograph as a motionless image, this does not mean only that the figures it represents do not move; it means that they do not (i)emerge(i), do not (i)leave(i): they are anesthetized and fastened down, like butterflies." ~ Roland Barthes

41. "We know the original relation of the theater and the cult of the Dead: the first actors separated themselves from the community by playing the role of the Dead: to make oneself up was to designate oneself as a body simultaneously living and dead: the whitened bust of the totemic theater, the man with the painted face in the Chinese theater, the rice-paste makeup of the Indian Katha-Kali, the Japanese No mask ... Now it is this same relation which I find in the Photograph; however 'lifelike' we strive to make it (and this frenzy to be lifelike can only be our mythic denial of an apprehension of death), Photography is a kind of primitive theater, a kind of Tableau Vivant, a figuration of the motionless and made-up face beneath which we see the dead." ~ Roland Barthes

42. "Usually the amateur is defined as an immature state of the artist: someone who cannot — or will not — achieve the mastery of a profession. But in the field of photographic practice, it is the amateur, on the contrary, who is the assumption of the professional: for it is he who stands closer to the (i)noeme(i) of Photography." ~ Roland Barthes

43. "It is by studium that I am interested in so many photographs, whether I receive them as political testimony or enjoy them as good historical scenes: for it is culturally (this connotation is present in studium) that I participate in the figures, the faces, the gestures, the settings, the actions." ~ Roland Barthes

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

45. "As a general rule, desire is always marketable: we don't do anything but sell, buy, exchange desires. . . . And I think of Bloy's words: "there is nothing perfectly beautiful except what is invisible and above all unbuyable." ~ Roland Barthes

46. "But I never looked like that!' - How do you know? What is the ‘you' you might or might not look like? Where do you find it - by which morphological or expressive calibration? Where is your authentic body? You are the only one who can never see yourself except as an image; you never see your eyes unless they are dulled by the gaze they rest upon the mirror or the lens (I am interested in seeing my eyes only when they look at you): even and especially for your own body, you are condemned to the repertoire of its images." ~ Roland Barthes

47. "The incapacity to name is a good symptom of disturbance." ~ Roland Barthes

48. "Each of us has his own rhythm of suffering." ~ Roland Barthes

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

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

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