Quotes by Roland Barthes

About Roland Barthes:

Roland Gérard Barthes was a French literary theorist, philosopher, linguist, critic, and semiotician. Barthes' ideas explored a diverse range of fields and he influenced the development of schools of theory including structuralism, semiotics, social theory, design theory, anthropology and post-structuralism.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Don’t bleach language, savour it instead. Stroke it gently or even groom it, but don’t “purify” it.

Roland Barthes

Where there is meaning, there is paradigm, and where there is paradigm (opposition), there is meaning . . . elliptically put: meaning rests on conflict (the choice of one term against another), and all conflict is generative of meaning: to choose one...

Roland Barthes

Absence is the figure of privation; simultaneously, I desire and I need. Desire is squashed against need: that is the obsessive phenomenon of all amorous sentiment.

Roland Barthes

Engulfment is a moment of hypnosis.

Roland Barthes

Are not couturiers the poets who, from year to year, from strophe to strophe, write the anthem of the feminine body?

Roland Barthes

I can do everything with my language but not with my body. What I hide by my language, my body utters. I can deliberately mold my message, not my voice. By my voice, whatever it says, the other will recognize "that something is wrong with me". I am a...

Roland Barthes

Love at first sight is a hypnosis: I am fascinated by an image: at first shaken, electrified, stunned, "paralysed" as Menon was by Socrates, the model of loved objects, of captivating images, or again converted by an apparition, nothing distinguishin...

Roland Barthes

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, w...

Roland Barthes

I cannot classify the other, for the other is, precisely, Unique, the singular Image which has miraculously come to correspond to the speciality of my desire. The other is the figure of my truth, and cannot be imprisoned in any stereotype (which is t...

Roland Barthes

To make someone wait: the constant prerogative of all power, "age-old pastime of humanity".

Roland Barthes

To know that one does not write for the other, to know that these things I am going to write will never cause me to be loved by the one I love (the other), to know that writing compensates for nothing, sublimates nothing, that it is precisely there w...

Roland Barthes

...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 read on, I skip, I look up, I dip in again. Which has nothing to do with the deep laceration the text of blis...

Roland Barthes

The pleasure of the text is that moment when my body pursues its own ideas—for my body does not have the same ideas as I do.

Roland Barthes

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 blisses of language, its Kama Sutra (this science has but one treatise: writing itself).

Roland Barthes

What right does my present have to speak of my past? Has my present some advantage over my past? What "grace" might have enlightened me? except that of passing time, or of a good cause, encountered on my way?

Roland Barthes

But I never looked like that!’ - How do you know? What is the ‘you’ you might or might not look like? Where do you find it - by which morphological or expressive calibration? Where is your authentic body? You are the only one who can never see ...

Roland Barthes

The art of living has no history: it does not evolve: the pleasure which vanishes vanishes for good, there is no substitute for it. Other pleasures come, which replace nothing. , nothing but mutations.

Roland Barthes

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

Roland Barthes

We don’t forget, but something vacant settles in us.

Roland Barthes

I transform "Work" in its analytic meaning (the Work of Mourning, the Dream-Work) into the real "Work" - of writing.) for: the "Work" by which (it is said) we emerge from the great crises (love, grief) cannot be liquidated hastily: for me, it is only...

Roland Barthes

Literature is the question minus the answer.

Roland Barthes

Author Bio

  • NameRoland Barthes
  • DescriptionFrench philosopher, critic and literary theorist
  • BornNovember 12, 1915
  • DiedMarch 26, 1980
  • CountryFrance
  • ProfessionPhilosopher; Linguist; Literary Critic; Writer