Roland Barthes Quotes

• Everything anachronistic is obscene.

  Roland Barthes

  Topics in Uncategorized

• Language is a skin; I rub my language against another language.

  Roland Barthes

  Topics in Uncategorized

• Any refusal of language is a death.

  Roland Barthes

  Topics in Uncategorized

• Touch is the most demystifying of all senses, different from sight which is the most magical.

  Roland Barthes

  Topics in Uncategorized

• Cars today are almost the exact equivalent of the great Gothic cathedrals…the supreme creation of an era, conceived with passion by unknown artists, and consummated in image if not in usage by a whole population which appropriates them as a purely magical object.

  Roland Barthes

  Topics in Uncategorized

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Car
• 

  The photograph, for all its promised immortality, always hinted at death.

  Roland Barthes

  Topics in Death

  Tags in Promised, Immortality

• A photograph is always invisible, it is not it that we see.

  Roland Barthes

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Invisible, Photograph

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Fun, Pretty

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

  Roland Barthes

  Topics in Power

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Better

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Against, Desire

• 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

  Topics in Power

• To eat steak rare… represents both a nature and a morality.

  Roland Barthes

  Topics in Nature

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Try

• Literature is the question minus the answer.

  Roland Barthes

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Literature

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

  Roland Barthes

  Topics in Knowledge

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Literature

• What the public wants is the image of passion, not passion itself.

  Roland Barthes

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Passion, Public

• 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

  Topics in Truth

  Tags in Live

Roland Barthes (27)

Birth:	12th November, 1915
Death:	26th March, 1980
Nationality:	French
Profession:	Critic, Philosopher, Theorist

About

Roland Gérard Barthes was a French literary theorist, philosopher, 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, anthropology and post-structuralism.

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Deaths

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