Roland Barthes quotes

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! (Roland Barthes)
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. View quote
Roland Barthes
What the public wants is the image of passion, not passion itself. View quote
Roland Barthes
Whereas the work is understood to be traceable to a source (through a process of derivation or "filiation"), the Text is without a source - the "author" a mere "guest" at the reading of the Text. View quote
Roland Barthes
There is only one way left to escape the alienation of present day society: to retreat ahead of it. View quote
Roland Barthes
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. View quote
Roland Barthes
A photograph is always invisible, it is not it that we see. View quote
Roland Barthes
Literature is the question minus the answer. View quote
Roland Barthes
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. View quote
Roland Barthes
The Text is not a definitive object. View quote
Roland Barthes
The petit-bourgeois is a man unable to imagine the Other. If he comes face to face with him, he blinds himself, ignores and denies him, or else transforms him into himself. (Roland Barthes)
I am interested in language because it wounds or seduces me. View quote
Roland Barthes
Each of us has his own rhythm of suffering. View quote
Roland Barthes
...the book creates meaning, the meaning creates life. View quote
Roland Barthes
We know that the war against intelligence is always waged in the name of common sense. View quote
Roland Barthes
All of a sudden it didn't bother me not being modern. View quote
Roland Barthes
In an initial period, Photography, in order to surprise, photographs the notable; but soon, by a familiar reversal, it decrees notable whatever it photographs. The 'anything whatever' then becomes the sophisticated acme of value. View quote
Roland Barthes
Don't say mourning. It's too psychoanalytic. I'm not mourning. I'm suffering. View quote
Roland Barthes
I make the other's absence responsible for my worldliness. View quote
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. View quote
Roland Barthes
The text you write must prove to me that it desires me. This proof exists: it is writing. Writing is: the science of the various blisses of language, its Kama Sutra (this science has but one treatise: writing itself). (Roland Barthes)
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., nothing but mutations. View quote
Roland Barthes
To make someone wait: the constant prerogative of all power, "age-old pastime of humanity". View quote
Roland Barthes
The incapacity to name is a good symptom of disturbance. View quote
Roland Barthes
I have not a desire but a need for solitude. View quote
Roland Barthes