Roland Barthes

Why is it better to last than to burn?

— Roland Barthes

Flaubert had infinite correction to perform.

— Roland Barthes

…the book creates meaning, the meaning creates life.

— Roland Barthes

Great portrait photographers are great mythologists.

— Roland Barthes

The photographic image... is a message without a code.

— Roland Barthes

I have not a desire but a need for solitude.

— Roland Barthes

Who speaks is not who writes, and who writes is not who is.

— Roland Barthes

Where you are tender, you speak your plural.

— Roland Barthes

“Suicide How would I know I don’t suffer any more, if I’m dead?”

— Roland Barthes

“—You have never known a Woman’s body! —I have known the body of my mother, sick and then dying.”

— Roland Barthes

“The (i)studium(i) is ultimately always coded, the (i)punctum is not)...”

— Roland Barthes

Is not the most erotic part of the body wherever the clothing affords a glimpse?

— Roland Barthes

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

— Roland Barthes

Those who fail to reread are obliged to read the same story everywhere.

— Roland Barthes

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

— Roland Barthes

Writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin.

— Roland Barthes

“This is why myth is experienced as innocent speech: not because its intentions are hidden—if they were hidden, they could not be…

— Roland Barthes

Le toucher est le plus de mystificateur de tous les sens, a' la diffe rence de la vue, qui est le plus…

— Roland Barthes

“(Nije li najbolnija točka tog žalovanja u tome što moram izgubiti jedan jezik - ljubavni jezik? Svršeno je s onim 'Volim te.')”

— Roland Barthes

“Afternoon with Michel, sorting maman’s belongings. Began the day by looking at her photographs. A cruel mourning begins again (but had never…

— Roland Barthes

“It is said that Time soothes mourning – No, Time makes nothing happen; it merely makes the emotivity of mourning pass.”

— Roland Barthes

Ultimately, Photography is subversive, not when it frightens, repels, or even stigmatizes, but when it is pensive, when it thinks.

— Roland Barthes

All those young photographers who are at work in the world, determined upon the capture of actuality, do not know that they…

— Roland Barthes

“True wrestling, wrong called amateur wrestling, is performed in second-rate halls, where the public spontaneously attunes itself to the spectacular nature of…

— Roland Barthes

Am I in love? --yes, since I am waiting. The other one never waits. Sometimes I want to play the part of…

— Roland Barthes

It is said that mourning, by its gradual labour, slowly erases pain; I could not, I cannot believe this; because for me,…

— Roland Barthes

The Text is plural. Which is not simply to say that it has several meanings, but that it accomplishes the very plural…

— Roland Barthes

To know that one does not write for the other, to know that these things I am going to write will never…

— Roland Barthes

Death of the Father would deprive literature of many of its pleasures. If there is no longer a Father, why tell stories?…

— Roland Barthes

“Endlessly I sustain the discourse of the beloved's absence; actually a preposterous situation; the other is absent as referent, present as allocutory.…

— Roland Barthes

In front of the photograph of my mother as a child, I tell myself: she is going to die: I shudder, like…

— Roland Barthes

“(yesterday) From the terrace of the Flore, I see a woman sitting on the windowsill of the bookstore La Hune; she is…

— Roland Barthes

“So long as I perceive the world as hostile, I remain linked to it: *I am not crazy*. But sometimes, once my…

— Roland Barthes

“I call the discourse of power any discourse which engenders blame, hence guilt, in its recipient. Some expect of us as intellectuals…

— Roland Barthes

“A paradox: the same century invented History and PHotography. But History is a memory fabricated according to positive formulas, a pure intellectual…

— Roland Barthes

Is not the most erotic portion of a body where the garment gapes? In perversion (which is the realm of textual pleasure)…

— Roland Barthes

“Powerless to utter itself, powerless to speak, love nonetheless wants to proclaim itself, to exclaim, to write itself everywhere: all’acqua, all’ombra, ai…

— Roland Barthes

“As Narrative (Novel, Passion), love is a story which is accomplished, in the sacred sense of the word: it is a program…

— Roland Barthes

“How to repulse a demon (an old problem)? The demons, especially if they are demons of language (and what else could they…

— Roland Barthes

“[Photography] allows me to accede to an infra-knowledge; it supplies me with a collection of partial objects and can flatter a certain…

— Roland Barthes