The Best Roland Barthes quotes

Language is never innocent. — Roland Barthes

Tout refus du langage est une mort. Any refusal of language is a death. — Roland Barthes

I am interested in language because it wounds or seduces me. — 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

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

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

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

Each of us has his own rhythm of suffering. — Roland Barthes

The Ventoux is a god of Evil, to which sacrifices must be made. It never forgives weakness and extracts an unfair tribute of suffering. — Roland Barthes

I live in my suffering and that makes me happy. Anything that keeps me from living in my suffering is unbearable to me. — Roland Barthes

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

How does meaning get into the image? Where does it end? And if it ends, what is there beyond? — Roland Barthes

The photographic image… is a message without a code. — Roland Barthes

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

The necessary condition for an image is sight. — Roland Barthes

I passed beyond the unreality of the thing represented, I entered crazily into the spectacle, into the image, taking into my arms what is dead, what is going to die. — Roland Barthes

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

Every photograph is a certificate of presence. — Roland Barthes

The realists do not take the photograph for a ‘copy’ of reality, but for an emanation of past reality, a magic, not an art. — Roland Barthes

When we look at a photograph of ourselves or of others, we are really looking at the return of the dead. — Roland Barthes

What the Photograph reproduces to infinity has occurred only once: the Photograph mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentially. — Roland Barthes

A picture is never anything but its own plural description. — 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

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 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

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

Suicide How would I know I don’t suffer any more, if I’m dead? — Roland Barthes

What love lays bare in me is energy. — 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

I have not a desire but a need for solitude. — 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

To whom can 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 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

A light without shadow generates an emotion without reserve. — Roland Barthes