Roland Barthes

The new is not a fashion, it is a value.

— Roland Barthes

Every exploration is an appropriation.

— Roland Barthes

Each of us has his own rhythm of suffering.

— Roland Barthes

Painting can feign reality without having seen it.

— Roland Barthes

The best principals are not heroes; they are hero makers.

— Roland Barthes

Frontiers are physical as well as symbolic constructions

— Roland Barthes

“I ask for nothing but to live in my suffering.”

— Roland Barthes

“Incoherence seems to me preferable to a distorting order.”

— 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

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

— Roland Barthes

“The measurement of mourning: eighteen months for mourning a father, a mother.”

— Roland Barthes

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

— Roland Barthes

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

— Roland Barthes

Thus every writer's motto reads: mad I cannot be, sane I do not deign to be, neurotic I am.

— Roland Barthes

Architecture is always dream and function, expression of a utopia and instrument of a convenience.

— Roland Barthes

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

— Roland Barthes

The realists do not take the photograph for a 'copy' of reality, but for an emanation of past reality, a magic, not…

— Roland Barthes

“To be engulfed: outburst of annihilation which affects the amorous subject in despair or fulfillment. At its best, when it’s fulfillment, it’s…

— Roland Barthes

Physically, the Ventoux is dreadful. Bald, it's the spirit of Dry: Its climate (it is much more an essence of climate than…

— Roland Barthes

If I had to create a god, I would lend him a “slow understanding”: a kind of drip-by-drip understanding of problems. People…

— Roland Barthes

The text you write must prove to me that it desires me. This proof exists: it is writing. Writing is: the science…

— Roland Barthes

“To instil into the Established Order the complacent portrayal of its drawbacks has nowadays become a paradoxical but incontrovertible means of exalting…

— Roland Barthes

The photographer, like an acrobat, must defy the laws of probability or even of possibility; at the limit, he must defy those…

— Roland Barthes

“Like man himself, who is the only one not to know his own glance, the [Eiffel] Tower is the only blind point…

— Roland Barthes

“Po mome ukusu, ništa nije indiskretnije od posmatranja nekog dok piše: još je indiskretnije videti nekog da čita jedva primetno mičući usnama.…

— Roland Barthes

For Death must be somewhere in a society; if it is no longer (or less intensely) in religion, it must be elsewhere;…

— Roland Barthes

“Where there is meaning, there is paradigm, and where there is paradigm (opposition), there is meaning . . . elliptically put: meaning…

— Roland Barthes

“There is a time when death is an event, an ad-venture, and as such mobilizes, interests, activates, tetanizes. And then one day…

— Roland Barthes

“Valéry used to speak of those people who die in an accident because they are unwilling to let go of their umbrellas;…

— Roland Barthes

I want a History of Looking. For the Photograph is the advent of myself as other: a cunning dissociation of consciousness from…

— Roland Barthes

Eiffel saw his Tower in the form of a serious object, rational, useful; men return it to him in the form of…

— Roland Barthes

To hide a passion totally (or even to hide, more simply, its excess) is inconceivable: not because the human subject is too…

— Roland Barthes

“Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or…

— Roland Barthes

“13084 Tonight I came back to the hotel alone; the other has decided to return later on. The anxieties are already here,…

— Roland Barthes

“Due allowance being made for the sounds of the language, writing aloud is not phonological but phonetic; its aim is not the…

— Roland Barthes

“We were friends and have become estranged. But this was right, and we do not want to conceal and obscure it from…

— Roland Barthes

But I never looked like that!’ - How do you know? What is the ‘you’ you might or might not look like?…

— Roland Barthes

“The truth of the matter is that—by an exorbitant paradox—I never stop believing that I am loved. I hallucinate what I desire.…

— Roland Barthes

“Hence the detail which interests me is not, or at least is not strictly intentional, and probably must not be so; it…

— Roland Barthes

“Love at first sight is a hypnosis: I am fascinated by an image: at first shaken, electrified, stunned, "paralysed" as Menon was…

— Roland Barthes