Top 140 Roland Barthes Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Ultimately, Photography is subversive, not when it frightens, repels, or even stigmatizes, but when it is pensive, when it thinks.”

— Roland Barthes

52. “A paradox: the same century invented history and photography. But history is a memory fabricated according to positive formulas, a pure intellectual discourse which abolishes mythic time; and the photograph is a certain but fugitive testimony.”

— Roland Barthes

53. “I encounter millions of bodies in my life; of these millions, I may desire some hundreds; but of these hundreds, I love only one.”

— Roland Barthes

54. “Every object in the world can pass from a closed, silent existence to an oral state, open to appropriation by society, for there is no law, whether natural or not, which forbids talking about things.”

— Roland Barthes

55. “Through the mythology of Einstein, the world blissfully regained the image of knowledge reduced to a formula.”

— Roland Barthes

56. “Literature is that which he can not read without pain, without choking on truth.”

— Roland Barthes

57. “Boredom is not far from bliss: it is bliss seen from the shores of pleasure.”

— Roland Barthes

58. “However paradoxical it may seem, myth hides nothing: its function is to distort, not to make disappear.”

— Roland Barthes

59. “I have a disease; I see language.”

— Roland Barthes

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

— Roland Barthes

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

— Roland Barthes

62. “All those young photographers who are at work in the world, determined upon the capture of actuality, do not know that they are agents of Death.”

— Roland Barthes

63. “I have tried to be as eclectic as I possibly can with my professional life, and so far it’s been pretty fun.”

— Roland Barthes

64. “Great portrait photographers are great mythologists.”

— Roland Barthes

65. “A photograph is always invisible, it is not it that we see.”

— Roland Barthes

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

— Roland Barthes

67. “It exists only for me. For you, it would be nothing but an indifferent picture.”

— Roland Barthes

68. “Frontiers are physical as well as symbolic constructions.”

— Roland Barthes

69. “I call the discourse of power any discourse that engenders blame, hence guilt, in its recipient.”

— Roland Barthes

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

— Roland Barthes

71. “To dope the racer is as criminal, as sacrilegious, as trying to imitate God; it is stealing from God the privilege of the spark.”

— Roland Barthes

72. “The petit-bourgeois is a man unable to imagine the Other. If he comes face to face with him, he blinds himself, ignores and denies him, or else transforms him into himself.”

— Roland Barthes

73. “Where you are tender, you speak your plural.”

— Roland Barthes

74. “Rarely do outside of school remedies work their way into the fabric of the schools or into the teachers lives, and more rarely into the classrooms. Therefore they only offer a modest hope of influencing the basic culture of the school.”

— Roland Barthes

75. “A light without shadow generates an emotion without reserve.”

— Roland Barthes

76. “Cameras, in short, were clocks for seeing, and perhaps in me someone very old still hears in the photographic mechanism the living sound of the wood.”

— Roland Barthes

77. “Is not the most erotic part of the body wherever the clothing affords a glimpse?”

— Roland Barthes

78. “Le langage est une peau: je frotte mon langage contre l’autre. Language is a skin; I rub my language against another language.”

— Roland Barthes

79. “Myth is neither a lie nor a confession: it is an inflexion.”

— Roland Barthes

80. “The new is not a fashion, it is a value.”

— Roland Barthes

81. “The realists do not take the photograph for a ‘copy’ of reality, but for an emanation of past reality, a magic, not an art.”

— Roland Barthes

82. “Despite the difficulties of my story, despite discomforts, doubts, despairs, despite impulses to be done with it, I unceasingly affirm love, within myself, as a value. Though I listen to all the arguments which the most divergent systems employ to demystify, to limit, to erase, in short, to depreciate love, I persist, “I know, I know, but all the same...”

— Roland Barthes

83. “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 the trouble of saying it.”

— Roland Barthes

84. “A cold winter night. I’m warm enough, yet I’m alone. And I realize that I’ll ‘have’ to get used to existing quite ‘naturally’ within the solitude, functioning there, working there, accompanied by, ‘fastened to’ the “presence of absence.”

— Roland Barthes

85. “It is no longer the sexual which is indecent, it is the sentimental.”

— Roland Barthes

86. “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 of Garbo is an Idea, that of Hepburn, an Event.”

— Roland Barthes

87. “It is my desire I desire, and the loved being is no more than its tool.”

— Roland Barthes

88. “I passed beyond the unreality of the thing represented, I entered crazily into the spectacle, into the image, taking into my arms what is dead, what is going to die...”

— Roland Barthes

89. “For the theatre one needs long arms; it is better to have them too long than too short. An artiste with short arms can never, never make a fine gesture.”

— Roland Barthes

90. “Television doomed us to the Family, whose household instrument it has become-what the hearth used to be, flanked by the communal kettle.”

— Roland Barthes

91. “But isn’t desire always the same, whether the object is present or absent? Isn’t the object always absent?”

— Roland Barthes

92. “The true act of mourning is not to suffer from the loss of the loved object; it is to discern one day, on the skin of the relationship, a certain tiny stain, appearing there as the symptom of a certain death : for the first time I am doing harm to the one I love, involuntarily, of course, but without panic.”

— Roland Barthes

93. “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, with nothing to do, punctual, even ahead of time. The lover’s fatal identity is precisely this: I am the one who waits.”

— Roland Barthes

94. “I counter whatever ‘doesn’t work’ in love with the affirmation of what is worthwhile. This stubbornness is love’s protest: for all the wealth of ‘good reasons’ for loving differently, loving better, loving without being in love, etc., a stubborn voice is raised which lasts a little longer: the voice of the intractable lover.”

— Roland Barthes

95. “The pleasure of the sentence is to a high degree cultural. The artifact created by rhetors, grammarians, linguists, teachers, writers, parents – this artifact is mimicked in a more or less ludic manner; we are playing with an exceptional object, whose paradox has been articulated by linguistics: immutably structured and yet infinitely renewable: something like chess.”

— Roland Barthes

96. “Even hidden in the most squalid Parisian halls, wrestling partakes of the nature of the great solar spectacles, Greek drama and bullfights: in both, a light without shadow generates an emotion without reserve.”

— Roland Barthes

97. “Myth does not deny thing, on the contrary, its function is to talk about them; simply, it purifies them, it makes them innocent, it gives them a natural and eternal justification, it gives them a clarity which is not that of an explanation but of a statement of fact.”

— Roland Barthes

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

— Roland Barthes

99. “Engulfment is a moment of hypnosis.”

— Roland Barthes

100. “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, excessive and impoverished.”

— Roland Barthes