Roland Barthes Quotes

124 quotes in 1690 categories

• A photograph is always invisible, it is not it that we see.
• 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…
• There is only one way left to escape the alienation of present day society: to retreat ahead of it.
• I have tried to be as eclectic as I possibly can with my professional life, and so far it's been pretty fun.
• 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,…
• What I claim is to live to the full the contradiction of my time, which may well make sarcasm the condition of truth.
• 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…
• 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…
• There are people who think that wrestling is an ignoble sport. Wrestling is not sport, it is a spectacle, and it is no more ignoble…
• To dope the racer is as criminal, as sacrilegious, as trying to imitate God; it is stealing from God the privilege of the spark.
• Other countries drink to get drunk, and this is accepted by everyone; in France, drunkenness is a consequence, never an intention. A drink is felt…
• Pleasure is continually disappointed, reduced, deflated, in favor of strong, noble values: Truth, Death, Progress, Struggle, Joy, etc. Its victorious rival is Desire: we are…
• The photographic image... is a message without a code.
• Myth is neither a lie nor a confession: it is an inflexion.
• Death of the Father would deprive literature of many of its pleasures. If there is no longer a Father, why tell stories? Doesn't every narrative…
• Ultimately, Photography is subversive, not when it frightens, repels, or even stigmatizes, but when it is pensive, when it thinks.
• The realists do not take the photograph for a 'copy' of reality, but for an emanation of past reality, a magic, not an art.
• The Photograph belongs to that class of laminated objects whose two leaves cannot be separated without destroying them both: the windowpane and the landscape, and…
• Wine is a part of society because it provides a basis not only for a morality but also for an environment; it is an ornament…
• Literature is the question minus the answer.

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