Roland Barthes Quotes (34 Quotes)

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.

Literature is the question minus the answer.

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

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!

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.

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

New York. . . is a city of geometric heights, a petrified desert of grids and lattices, an inferno of greenish abstraction under a flat sky, a real Metropolis from which man is absent by his very accumulation.

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.

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

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

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

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

The photographic image... is a message without a code.

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

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.

All official institutions of language are repeating machines school, sports, advertising, popular songs, news, all continually repeat the same structure, the same meaning, often the same words. . .

To hide a passion totally (or even to hide, more simply, its excess) is inconceivable not because the human subject is too weak, but because passion is in essence made to be seen the hiding must be seen I want you to know that I am hiding something...

There are two kinds of liberalism. A liberalism which is always, subterraneously authoritative and paternalistic, on the side of one's good conscience. And then there is a liberalism which is more ethical than political one would have to find another name for this. Something like a profound suspension of judgment.

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.

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

Wine is a part of society because it provides a basis not only for a morality but also for an environment it is an ornament in the slightest ceremonials of French daily life, from the snack. . . to the feast. . .

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

Other countries drink to get drunk, and this is accepted by everyone in France, drunkenness is a consequence, never an intention. A drink is felt as the spinning out of a pleasure, not as the necessary cause of an effect which is sought wine is not only a philter, it is also the leisurely act of drinking.

Historically and politically, the petit-bourgeois is the key to the century. . . . The bourgeois and proletariat classes have become abstractions the petite-bourgeoisie, in contrast, is everywhere, you can see it everywhere. . .

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.

Very often (too often in my view) I was aware of being photographed. So, from the moment I feel I am in the camera's eye, everything changes I begin to pose, I immediately create a different body, I change even before the image.

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.

To endow the writer publicly with a good fleshly body, to reveal that he likes dry white wine and underdone steak, is to make even more miraculous for me, and of a more divine essence, the products of his art.

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

Inexpressible LoveTo 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, to know that writing compensates for nothing..

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.

What the Journal posits is not the tragic question, the Madman's question Who am I, but the comic question, the Bewildered Man's question Am I A comic --a comedian, that's what the Journal keeper is.

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

The New is not a fashion, it is a value.