Top 140 Roland Barthes Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “A mandarin fell in love with a courtesan. ‘I shall be yours,’ she told him, ‘when you have spent a hundred nights waiting for me, sitting on a stool, in my garden, beneath my window.’ But on the ninety-ninth night, the mandarin stood up, put his stool under his arm, and went away.”

— Roland Barthes

102. “What is a hero? The one who has the last word. Can we think of a hero who does not speak before dying?”

— Roland Barthes

103. “The photographer, like an acrobat, must defy the laws of probability or even of possibility; at the limit, he must defy those of the interesting: the photograph becomes surprising when we do not know why it has been taken.”

— Roland Barthes

104. “The gift is contact, sensuality: you will be touching what I have touched, a third skin unites us.”

— Roland Barthes

105. “To expend oneself, to bestir oneself for an impenetrable object is pure religion. To make the other into an insoluble riddle on which my life depends is to consecrate the other as a god; I shall never manage to solve the question the other asks me, the lover is not Oedipus. Then all that is left for me to do is to reverse my ignorance into truth.”

— Roland Barthes

106. “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. No progress in pleasures, nothing but mutations.”

— Roland Barthes

107. “When we look at a photograph of ourselves or of others, we are really looking at the return of the dead.”

— Roland Barthes

108. “The incapacity to name is a good symptom of disturbance.”

— Roland Barthes

109. “The portrait-photograph is a closed field of forces. Four image-repertoires intersect here, oppose and distort each other. In front of the lens, I am at the same time: the one I think I am, the one I want others to think I am, the one the photographer thinks I am, and the one he makes use of to exhibit his art.”

— Roland Barthes

110. “It must always be considered as though spoken by a character in a novel.”

— Roland Barthes

111. “Justice is always ready to lend you a spare brain in order to condemn you without a second thought.”

— Roland Barthes

112. “The lover’s discourse is usually a smooth envelope which encases the Image, a very gentle glove around the loved being.”

— Roland Barthes

113. “I can’t get to know you” means “I shall never know what you really think of me.” I cannot decipher you because I do not know how you decipher me.”

— Roland Barthes

114. “This would be the structure of the “successful” couple: a little prohibition, a good deal of play; to designate desire and then to leave it alone, like those obliging natives who show you the path but don’t insist on accompanying you on your way.”

— Roland Barthes

115. “The measurement of mourning: eighteen months for mourning a father, a mother.”

— Roland Barthes

116. “The other’s body was divided: on one side, the body proper – skin, eyes – tender, warm; and on the other side, the voice – abrupt, reserved, subject to fits of remoteness, a voice which did not give what the body gave. Or further: on one side, the soft, warm, downy. adorable body. and on the other, the ringing, well-formed. worldly voice – always the voice.”

— Roland Barthes

117. “Like a kind of melancholy mirage, the other withdraws into infinity and I wear myself out trying to get there.”

— Roland Barthes

118. “The photograph touches me if I withdraw it from its usual blah-blah: “Technique,” “Reality,” “Reportage,” “Art,” etc.: to say nothing, to shut my eyes, to allow the detail to rise of its own accord into affective consciousness.”

— Roland Barthes

119. “Depression comes when, in the depths of despair, I cannot manage to save myself by my attachment to writing.”

— Roland Barthes

120. “To visit the Tower, then, is to enter into contact not with a historical Sacred, as is the case for the majority of monuments, but rather with a new nature, that of human space: the Tower is not a trace, a souvenir, in short culture; but an immediate consumption of a humanity made natural by that glance which transforms it into space.”

— Roland Barthes

121. “Any demand is frigid until desire, until neurosis forms in it.”

— Roland Barthes

122. “I want to be both pathetic and admirable, I want to be at the same time a child and an adult. Thereby I gamble, I take a risk: for it is always possible that the other will simply ask no question whatever about these unaccustomed glasses; that the other will see, in the fact, no sign.”

— Roland Barthes

123. “Le langage est une peau: je frotte mon langage contre l’autre.”

— Roland Barthes

124. “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.”

— Roland Barthes

125. “In an initial period, Photography, in order to surprise, photographs the notable; but soon, by a familiar reversal, it decrees notable whatever it photographs. The ‘anything whatever’ then becomes the sophisticated acme of value.”

— Roland Barthes

126. “I think that cars today are almost the exact equivalent of the great Gothic cathedrals; I mean the supreme creation of an era, conceived with passion by unknown artists, and consumed in image if not in usage by a whole population which appropriates them as a purely magical object.”

— Roland Barthes

127. “To induce a collective content for the imagination is always an inhuman undertaking, not only because dreaming essentializes life into destiny, but also because dreams are impoverished, and the alibi of an absence.”

— Roland Barthes

128. “Like love, mourning affects the world – and the worldly – with unreality, with importunity. I resist the world, I suffer from what it demands of me, from its demands. The world increases my sadness, my dryness, my confusion, my irritation, etc. The world depresses me.”

— Roland Barthes

129. “Here and there, on the trees, some leaves remain. And I often stand deep in thought before them. I contemplate a leaf and attach my hope to it. When the wind plays with the leaf, I tremble in every limb. And if it should fall, alas, my hope falls with it.” – Schubert.”

— Roland Barthes

130. “Today there is no symbolic compensation for old age, no recognition of a specific value: wisdom, perceptiveness, experience, vision.”

— Roland Barthes

131. “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

132. “It is said that Time soothes mourning – No, Time makes nothing happen; it merely makes the emotivity of mourning pass.”

— Roland Barthes

133. “Flaubert had infinite correction to perform.”

— Roland Barthes

134. “The picturesque is found any time the ground is uneven.”

— Roland Barthes

135. “And, long after the amorous relation is allayed, I keep the habit of hallucinating the being I have loved: sometimes I am still in anxiety over a telephone call that is late, and no matter who is on the line, I imagine I recognize the voice I once loved: I am an amputee who still feels pain in his missing leg.”

— Roland Barthes

136. “Suffering; impossibility of being comfortable anywhere; oppression, irritations and remorse one after the next, everything under the sign “wretchedness of man,” used by Pascal.”

— Roland Barthes

137. “Horrible figure of mourning: acedia, hard-heartedness: irritability, impotence to love. Anguished because I don’t know how to restore generosity to my life – or love. How to love?”

— Roland Barthes

138. “Language is never innocent.”

— Roland Barthes

139. “The politician being interviewed clearly takes a great deal of trouble to imagine an ending to his sentence: and if he stopped short? His entire policy would be jeopardized!”

— Roland Barthes

140. “My claim is to live to the full contradiction of my time.”

— Roland Barthes

141. “I limp along through my mourning.”

— Roland Barthes

142. “Only I know what my road has been for the last year and a half: the economy of this motionless and anything but spectacular mourning that has kept me unceasingly separate by its demands; a separation that I have ultimately always projected to bring to a close by a book – Stubbornness, secrecy.”

— Roland Barthes

143. “Miseries of a birth.”

— Roland Barthes

144. “I pass lightly through the reactionary darkness.”

— Roland Barthes

145. “In this mythology of seafaring, there is only one means to exorcise the possessive nature of the man on a ship; it is to eliminate the man and to leave the ship on its own. The ship then is no longer a box, a habitat, an object that is owned; it becomes a travelling eye, which comes close to the infinite; it constantly begets departures.”

— Roland Barthes

146. “Tautology creates a dead, a motionless world.”

— Roland Barthes

147. “We are all potential Dominicis, not as murderers but as accused, deprived of language, or worse, rigged out in that of our accusers, humiliated and condemned by it. To rob a man of his language in the very name of language: this is the first step in all legal murder.”

— Roland Barthes

148. “I’m cold,” the lover says, “let’s go back,” but there is no road, no way, the boat is wrecked.”

— Roland Barthes