Roland Barthes Quotes

One of the marks of our world is perhaps this reversal: we live according to a generalized image-rep...

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

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

The text you write must prove to me that it desires me. This proof exists: it is writing. Writing is...

...what I enjoy in a narrative is not directly its content or even its structure, but rather the abr...

Today, information: pulverized, nonhierarchized, dealing with everything: nothing is protected from ...

Don’t bleach language, savour it instead. Stroke it gently or even groom it, but don’t “purify” it.

If I had to create a god, I would lend him a “slow understanding”: a kind of drip-by-drip understand...

Where there is meaning, there is paradigm, and where there is paradigm (opposition), there is meanin...

As a general rule, desire is always marketable: we don’t do anything but sell, buy, exchange desires...

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

Language is neither reactionary nor progressive; it is quite simply fascist; for fascism does not pr...

Are not couturiers the poets who, from year to year, from strophe to strophe, write the anthem of th...

Literature is that neuter, that composite, that oblique into which every subject escapes, the trap w...

But I never looked like that!’ - How do you know? What is the ‘you’ you might or might not look like...

What right does my present have to speak of my past? Has my present some advantage over my past? Wha...

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

I think that cars today are almost the exact equivalent of the great Gothic cathedrals; I mean the s...

I have not a desire but a need for solitude.

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

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

Paradoxically (since people say: Work, amuse yourself, see friends) it’s when we’re busy, distracted...

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

Miseries of a birth.

The author enters into his own death, writing begins.

In this manner , we are told, the system of the imaginary is spread circularly, by detours and retur...

When we define the Photograph as a motionless image, this does not mean only that the figures it rep...

In an initial period, Photography, in order to surprise, photographs the notable; but soon, by a fam...

The Photograph is an extended, loaded evidence — as if it caricatured not the figure of what it repr...

The photograph is literally an emanation of the referent. From a real body, which was there, proceed...

For Death must be somewhere in a society; if it is no longer (or less intensely) in religion, it mus...

For the photograph's immobility is somehow the result of a perverse confusion between two concepts: ...

We know the original relation of the theater and the cult of the Dead: the first actors separated th...

The Winter Photograph was my Ariadne, not because it would help me discover a secret thing (monster ...

The Photograph is violent: not because it shows violent tings, but because on each occasion (i)it fi...

For me the noise of Time is not sad: I love bells, clocks, watches — and I recall that at first phot...

The incapacity to name is a good symptom of disturbance.

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

It is by studium that I am interested in so many photographs, whether I receive them as political te...

I feel that the Photograph creates my body or mortifies it, according to its caprice (apology of thi...

...The editors of (i)Life(i) rejected Kerész'a photographs when he arrived in the United States in 1...

The unary Photograph has every reason to be banal, 'unity' of composition being the first rule of vu...

Another unary photograph is the pornographic photograph (I am not saying the erotic photograph: the ...

[Photography] allows me to accede to an infra-knowledge; it supplies me with a collection of partial...

I imagine that the essential gesture of the Operator is to surprise something or someone (through th...

Usually the amateur is defined as an immature state of the artist: someone who cannot — or will not ...

What pricks me is the discovery of this equivalence. In front of the photograph of my mother as a ch...

Each photograph is read as the private appearance of its referent: the age of Photography correspond...

It is as if the Photograph always carries its referent with itself, both affected by the same amorou...

Hence the detail which interests me is not, or at least is not strictly intentional, and probably mu...

Absence is the figure of privation; simultaneously, I desire and I need. Desire is squashed against ...

You see the first thing we love is a scene. For love at first sight requires the very sign of its su...

Am I in love? – yes, since I am waiting. The other one never waits. Sometimes I want to play the par...

Gossip reduces the other to he/she, and this reduction is intolerable to me. For me the other is nei...

(Love’s atopia, characteristic which causes it to escape all dissertations, would be that *ultimatel...

…This singular reversal may perhaps proceed from the fact that for us the “subject” (since Christian...

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

I can do everything with my language but not with my body. What I hide by my language, my body utter...

To know that one does not write for the other, to know that these things I am going to write will ne...

Engulfment is a moment of hypnosis.

You see the first thing we love is a scene. For love at first sight requires the very sign of its su...

Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers,...

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

Above all, do not attempt to be exhaustive.

To whom could I put this question (with any hope of an answer)? Does being able to live without some...

Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers,...

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

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

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

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

Flaubert had infinite correction to perform.

Each of us has his own rhythm of suffering.

So long as I perceive the world as hostile, I remain linked to it: *I am not crazy*. But sometimes, ...

Ultimately — or at the limit — in order to see a photograph well, it is best to look away or close y...

I experience reality as a system of power. Coluche, the restaurant, the painter, Rome on a holiday, ...

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

If I like a photograph, if it disturbs me, I linger over it. What am I doing, during the whole times...