Roland Barthes Quotes

59 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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.

Roland Barthes
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
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
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.

Roland Barthes
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.

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

Roland Barthes
I cannot classify the other, for the other is, precisely, Unique, the singular Image which has miraculously come to correspond to the speciality of my desire. The other is the figure of my truth, and cannot be imprisoned in any stereotype (which is the truth of others).

Roland Barthes
I want to be both pathetic and admirable, I want to be at the same time a child and an adult. Thereby I gamble, I take a risk: for it is always possible that the other will simply ask no question whatever about these unaccustomed glasses; that the other will see, in the fact, no sign.

Roland Barthes
Ensnared in his starvation, Chaplin-man is always just below political awareness. A strike is a catastrophe for him because it threatens a man truly blinded by his hunger; this man achieves an awareness of the working-class condition only when the poor man and the proletarian coincide under the gaze (and the blows) of the police.

Roland Barthes
Despite having names of Greek shepherds (Polystyrene, Polyvinyl, Polyethylene), plastic... is in essence the stuff of alchemy.

Roland Barthes
The face of Garbo is an Idea, that of Hepburn an Event.

Roland Barthes
In the hierarchy of the major poetic substances, it [plastic] figures as a disgraced material, lost between the effusiveness of rubber and the flat hardness of metal.

Roland Barthes
There are people who think that wrestling is an ignoble sport. Wrestling is not sport, it is a spectacle, and it is no more ignoble to attend a wrestled performance of suffering than a performance of the sorrows of Arnolphe or Andromaque.

Roland Barthes
All the toys one commonly sees are essentially a microcosm of the adult world; they are all reduced copies of human objects, as if in the eyes of the public the child was, all told, nothing but a smaller man, a homunculus to whom must be supplied objects of his own size.

Roland Barthes
More than a substance, plastic is the very idea of its infinite transformation; as its everyday name indicates, it is ubiquity made visible.

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.

Roland Barthes
The text you write must prove to me that it desires me.

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.

Roland Barthes
Someone tells me: this kind of love is not viable. But how can you evaluate viability? Why is the viable a Good Thing? Why is it better to last than to burn?

Roland Barthes
What do things signify, what does the world signify? All literature is this question, but we must immediately add, for this is what constitutes its specialty, literature is this question minus its answer.

Roland Barthes
The goal of literary work (of literature as work) is to make the reader no longer a consumer but a producer of the text.

Roland Barthes