Roland Barthes Quotes

59 Sourced Quotes

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

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

Roland Barthes
Wine is a part of society because it provides a basis not only for a morality but also for an environment; it is an ornament in the slightest ceremonials of French daily life, from the snack to the feast, from the conversation at the local cafT to the speech at a formal dinner.

Roland Barthes
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
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.

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
The discourse on the Text should itself be nothing other than text, research, textual activity, since the Text is that social space which leaves no language safe, outside, nor any subject of the enunciation in position as judge, master, analyst, confessor, decoder. The theory of the Text can coincide only with a practice of writing.

Roland Barthes
As a language, Garbo's singularity was of the order of the concept, that of Audrey Hepburn is of the order of the substance; the face of Garbo is an Idea, that of Hepburn, an Event.

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

Roland Barthes
Once the Author is removed, the claim to decipher a text becomes quite futile. To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signifier, to close the writing.

Roland Barthes
If I acknowledge my dependency, I do so because for me it is a means of signifying my demand: in the realm of love, futility is not a "weakness" or an "absurdity": it is a strong sign: the more futile, the more it signifies and the more it asserts itself as strength.)

Roland Barthes
Other countries drink to get drunk, and this is accepted by everyone; in France, drunkenness is a consequence, never an intention. A drink is felt as the spinning out of a pleasure, not as the necessary cause of an effect which is sought: wine is not only a philtre, it is also the leisurely act of drinking.

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

Roland Barthes
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.

Roland Barthes
Eiffel saw his Tower in the form of a serious object, rational, useful; men return it to him in the form of a great baroque dream which quite naturally touches on the borders of the irrational... architecture is always dream and function, expression of a utopia and instrument of a convenience.

Roland Barthes
Television doomed us to the Family, whose household entertainment it has become—what the hearth used to be, flanked by the communal kettle.

Roland Barthes
A work has two levels of meaning: literal and concealed.
A Text, on the other hand is engaged in a movement … a deferral … a dilation of meaning … the play of signification.
Metonymy — the association of part to whole — characterized the logic of the Text.
In this sense the Text is "radically symbolic" and lacks closure.

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

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

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

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

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

Roland Barthes
Even hidden in the most squalid Parisian halls, wrestling partakes of the nature of the great solar spectacles, Greek drama and bullfights: in both, a light without shadow generates an emotion without reserve.

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

Roland Barthes
Death of the Father would deprive literature of many of its pleasures. If there is no longer a Father, why tell stories? Doesn't every narrative lead back to Oedipus? Isn't storytelling always a way of searching for one's origin, speaking one's conflicts with the Law, entering into the dialectic of tenderness and hatred?

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.

Roland Barthes