Roland Barthes famous quotes

04-17-2025

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

#Book #Cost #Birth
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

#Desire #Skins #Language And Power
The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.
-- Roland Barthes

#Culture #Tissues #Centre
Each of us has his own rhythm of suffering.
-- Roland Barthes

#Sad #Grief #Bereavement
The author enters into his own death, writing begins.
-- Roland Barthes

#Writing
Literature is the question minus the answer.
-- Roland Barthes

#Art #Healing #Poetry
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

#Answers #Explosions #Interpretation
How does meaning get into the image? Where does it end? And if it ends, what is there beyond?
-- Roland Barthes

#Doe #Ends #Ifs
Every photograph is a certificate of presence.
-- Roland Barthes

#Photograph #Certificates
...language is never innocent.
-- Roland Barthes

#Language #Innocent
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

#Speech #Language #Forget
We know that the war against intelligence is always waged in the name of common sense.
-- Roland Barthes

#War #Names #Common Sense
Ultimately, Photography is subversive, not when it frightens, repels, or even stigmatizes, but when it is pensive, when it thinks.
-- Roland Barthes

#Photography #Thinking #Pensive
To make someone wait: the constant prerogative of all power.
-- Roland Barthes

#Waiting #Constant #Prerogative
Am I in love? --yes, since I am waiting. The other one never waits. Sometimes I want to play the part of the one who doesn't wait; 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. The lover's fatal identity is precisely this: I am the one who waits.
-- Roland Barthes

#Games #Play #Waiting
A light without shadow generates an emotion without reserve.
-- Roland Barthes

#Light #Shadow #Emotion
Every exploration is an appropriation.
-- Roland Barthes

#Exploration #Appropriation
I am interested in language because it wounds or seduces me.
-- Roland Barthes

#Language #Seducing #Wounds
What love lays bare in me is energy.
-- Roland Barthes

#Energy #Lays
Who speaks is not who writes, and who writes is not who is.
-- Roland Barthes

#Writing #Speak
We don't forget, but something vacant settles in us.
-- Roland Barthes

#Forget #Settling #Vacant
The photograph is literally an emanation of the referent. From a real body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me, who am here; the duration of the transmission is insignificant; the photograph of the missing being, as Sontag says, will touch me like the delayed rays of a star.
-- Roland Barthes

#Stars #Real #Missing
Man does not exist prior to language, either as a species or as an individual.
-- Roland Barthes

#Men #Doe #Language
The photographic image... is a message without a code.
-- Roland Barthes

#Photography #Messages #Code
Where you are tender, you speak your plural.
-- Roland Barthes

#Speak #Where You Are

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