« All Language Quotes · Roland Barthes's Page
Language Quotes by Roland Barthes
- 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…
- 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,…
- 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…
- All official institutions of language are repeating machines: school, sports, advertising, popular songs, news, all continually repeat the same structure, the same meaning, often the…
- Man does not exist prior to language, either as a species or as an individual.
- ...what I enjoy in a narrative is not directly its content or even its structure, but rather the abrasions I impose upon the fine surface:…
- I am interested in language because it wounds or seduces me.
- ...language is never innocent.
- The text you write must prove to me that it desires me. This proof exists: it is writing. Writing is: the science of the various…
- 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…
- 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.
More Language Quotes
- Only the mob and the elite can be attracted by the momentum of totalitarianism itself. The masses have to be won by… — Hannah Arendt
- High thoughts must have high language. — Aristophanes
- In making a speech one must study three points: first, the means of producing persuasion; second, the language; third the proper arrangement… — Aristotle
- But I liked Yeats! That wild Irishman. I really loved his love of language, his flow. His chaotic ideas seemed to me… — Chinua Achebe
- War is what happens when language fails. — Margaret Atwood
- As soon as you have a language that has a past tense and a future tense you're going to say, 'Where did… — Margaret Atwood
- A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language. — Wystan Hugh Auden
- A poem records emotions and moods that lie beyond normal language, that can only be patched together and hinted at metaphorically. — Diane Ackerman
- The finest command of language is often shown by saying nothing. — Roger Babson
- A special kind of beauty exists which is born in language, of language, and for language. — Gaston Bachelard
- In any area of the U.N. we... have to agree on certain language that can represent the same spirit, but that can… — Michelle Bachelet
- An inability to stay quiet is one of the conspicuous failings of mankind. — Walter Bagehot