Top 140 Roland Barthes Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— Roland Barthes

2. “Literature is the question minus the answer.”

— Roland Barthes

3. “The best principals are not heroes; they are hero makers.”

— Roland Barthes

4. “One must turn the tongue seven times in the mouth before speaking.”

— Roland Barthes

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

— Roland Barthes

6. “Writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin.”

— Roland Barthes

7. “To make someone wait: the constant prerogative of all power.”

— Roland Barthes

8. “The author enters into his own death, writing begins.”

— Roland Barthes

9. “I love you is unsubtle. It removes explanations, facilities, degrees, scruples.”

— Roland Barthes

10. “Every photograph is a certificate of presence.”

— Roland Barthes

11. “We know that the war against intelligence is always waged in the name of common sense.”

— Roland Barthes

12. “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 tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.”

— Roland Barthes

13. “Every exploration is an appropriation.”

— Roland Barthes

14. “I have not a desire but a need for solitude.”

— Roland Barthes

15. “The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.”

— Roland Barthes

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

— Roland Barthes

17. “Who speaks is not who writes, and who writes is not who is.”

— Roland Barthes

18. “Each of us has his own rhythm of suffering.”

— Roland Barthes

19. “I am interested in language because it wounds or seduces me.”

— Roland Barthes

20. “The lover’s fatal identity is precisely this: I am the one who waits.”

— Roland Barthes

21. “The gesture of the amorous embrace seems to fulfill, for a time, the subject’s dream of total union with the loved being: The longing for consummation with the other...”

— Roland Barthes

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

— Roland Barthes

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

— Roland Barthes

24. “Language is neither reactionary nor progressive; it is quite simply fascist; for fascism does not prevent speech, it compels speech.”

— Roland Barthes

25. “Painting can feign reality without having seen it.”

— Roland Barthes

26. “He who reads a story only once is condemned to read the same story his whole life.”

— Roland Barthes

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

27. “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 always being told about Desire, never about Pleasure.”

— Roland Barthes

Featured in: Strong Quotes

28. “What I claim is to live to the full the contradiction of my time, which may well make sarcasm the condition of truth.”

— Roland Barthes

29. “Don’t say mourning. It’s too psychoanalytic. I’m not mourning. I’m suffering.”

— Roland Barthes

30. “A picture is never anything but its own plural description.”

— Roland Barthes

31. “What the Photograph reproduces to infinity has occurred only once: the Photograph mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentially.”

— Roland Barthes

32. “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 attend a wrestled performance of suffering than a performance of the sorrows of Arnolphe or Andromaque.”

— Roland Barthes

33. “Why is it better to last than to burn?”

— Roland Barthes

34. “There is nothing in discourse that is not to be found in a sentence.”

— Roland Barthes

35. “All of a sudden it didn’t bother me not being modern.”

— Roland Barthes

36. “The bastard form of mass culture is humiliated repetition... always new books, new programs, new films, news items, but always the same meaning.”

— Roland Barthes

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

— Roland Barthes

38. “Someone tells me: this kind of love is not viable. But how can you evaluate viability? Why is the viable a Good Thing? Why is it better to last than to burn?”

— Roland Barthes

39. “I make the other’s absence responsible for my worldliness.”

— Roland Barthes

40. “If I had to create a god, I would lend him a “slow understanding”: a kind of drip-by-drip understanding of problems. People who understand quickly frighten me.”

— Roland Barthes

41. “If I like a photograph, if it disturbs me, I linger over it. What am I doing, during the whole times I remain with it? I look at it, I scrutinize it, as if I wanted to know more about the thing or the person it represents... I want to outline the loved face by thought, to make it into the unique field of an intense observation; I want to enlarge this face in order to see it better, to understand it better, to know its truth.”

— Roland Barthes

42. “I try to busy myself elsewhere, to arrive late; but I always lose at this game. Whatever I do, I find myself there, with nothing to do, punctual, even ahead of time.”

— Roland Barthes

43. “A man who wants the truth is never answered save in strong, highly colored images, which nonetheless turn ambiguous, indecisive, once he tries to transform them into signs, as in any manticism, the consulting lover must make his own truth.”

— Roland Barthes

44. “How does meaning get into the image? Where does it end? And if it ends, what is there beyond?”

— Roland Barthes

45. “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 classification, and that all classifications are oppressive.”

— Roland Barthes

46. “The cultural work done in the past by gods and epic sagas is now done by laundry-detergent commercials and comic-strip character.”

— Roland Barthes

47. “What love lays bare in me is energy.”

— Roland Barthes

48. “This endured absence is nothing more or less than forgetfulness. I am, intermittently, unfaithful. This is the condition of my survival.”

— Roland Barthes

49. “Every new Fashion is a refusal to inherit, a subversion against the oppression of the preceding Fashion; Fashion experiences itself as a Right, the natural right of the present over the past.”

— Roland Barthes

50. “Fashion postulates an achrony, a time which does not exist; here the past is shameful and the present is constantly “eaten up” by the Fashion being heralded.”

— Roland Barthes