Roland Barthes Short Quotes

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

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

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

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

Roland Barthes
It is no longer the sexual which is indecent, it is the sentimental.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Fashion postulates an achrony, a time which does not exist; here the past is shameful and the present is constantly "eaten up" by the Fashion being heralded.

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
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
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
The gesture of the amorous embrace seems to fulfill, for a time, the subject's dream of total union with the loved being: The longing for consummation with the other...

Roland Barthes