110+ Roland Barthes Quotes On Photography, Semiotic And Structuralist

Roland Barthes was a French literary theorist, philosopher, linguist, critic, and semiotician. He is known for his essays on semiotics, structuralism, and his analysis of contemporary cultural phenomena. He is also known for his works on literature, such as Mythologies, which looks at how language and symbols shape culture and communication. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Roland Barthes on photography, semiotic, structuralist.

Top 10 Roland Barthes Quotes

1. 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.
2. ...language is never innocent.
3. Each of us has his own rhythm of suffering.
4. I am interested in language because it wounds or seduces me.
5. 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.
6. The skyscraper establishes the block, the block creates the street, the street offers itself to man.
7. 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.
8. Literature is the question minus the answer.
9. A light without shadow generates an emotion without reserve.
10. There is only one way left to escape the alienation of present day society: to retreat ahead of it.

Roland Barthes Image Quotes

I am interested in language because it wounds or seduces me. — Roland Barthes

Roland Barthes Short Quotes

• Don't say mourning. It's too psychoanalytic. I'm not mourning. I'm suffering.
• Is not the most erotic part of the body wherever the clothing affords a glimpse?
• Myth is neither a lie nor a confession: it is an inflexion.
• To make someone wait: the constant prerogative of all power.
• To eat steak rare . . . represents both a nature and a morality.
• The best principals are not heroes; they are hero makers.
• Every exploration is an appropriation.
• The incapacity to name is a good symptom of disturbance.
• I make the other’s absence responsible for my worldliness.
• The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.

Roland Barthes Quotes About Photography

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

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

Ultimately, Photography is subversive, not when it frightens, repels, or even stigmatizes, but when it is pensive, when it thinks. — Roland Barthes

The photographic image... is a message without a code. — Roland Barthes

Each photograph is read as the private appearance of its referent: the age of Photography corresponds precisely to the explosion of the private into the public, or rather into the creation of a new social value, which is the publicity of the private: the private is consumes as such, publicly. — Roland Barthes

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

As Spectator I wanted to explore photography not as a question (a theme) but as a wound. — Roland Barthes

What the Photograph reproduces to infinity has occurred only once: the Photograph mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentially. — Roland Barthes

Roland Barthes Quotes About Language

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: the stereotype is a political fact, the major figure of ideology. — Roland Barthes

Isn’t the most sensitive point of this mourning the fact that I must lose a language — the amorous language? No more ‘I love you’s. — Roland Barthes

The text you write must prove to me that it desires me. This proof exists: it is writing. Writing is: the science of the various blisses of language, its Kama Sutra (this science has but one treatise: writing itself). — Roland Barthes

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

Tout refus du langage est une mort. Any refusal of language is a death. — Roland Barthes

Man does not exist prior to language, either as a species or as an individual. — Roland Barthes

Language is neither reactionary nor progressive; it is quite simply fascist; for fascism does not prevent speech, it compels speech. — Roland Barthes

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

Roland Barthes Quotes About Society

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, from the conversation at the local caf? to the speech at a formal dinner. — Roland Barthes

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

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

Roland Barthes Quotes About Desire

Isn’t desire always the same, whether the object is present or absent? Isn’t the object always absent? —This isn’t the same languor: there are two words: Pothos, desire for the absent being, and Himéros, the more burning desire for the present being. — Roland Barthes

I cannot classify the other, for the other is, precisely, Unique, the singular Image which has miraculously come to correspond to the speciality of my desire. The other is the figure of my truth, and cannot be imprisoned in any stereotype (which is the truth of others). — Roland Barthes

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

Is the scene always visual? It can be aural, the frame can be linguistic: I can fall in love with a sentence spoken to me: and not only because it says something which manages to touch my desire, but because of its syntactical turn (framing), which will inhabit me like a memory. — Roland Barthes

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

I have not a desire but a need for solitude. — Roland Barthes

Roland Barthes Famous Quotes And Sayings

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. — Roland Barthes

I am interested in language because it wounds or seduces me. — Roland Barthes

As a jealous man, I suffer four times over: because I am jealous, because I blame myself for being so, because I fear that my jealousy will wound the other, because I allow myself to be subject to a banality: I suffer from being excluded, from being aggressive, from being crazy, and from being common. — Roland Barthes

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

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

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

...what I enjoy in a narrative is not directly its content or even its structure, but rather the abrasions I impose upon the fine surface: I read on, I skip, I look up, I dip in again. Which has nothing to do with the deep laceration the text of bliss inflicts upon language itself, and not upon the simple temporality of its reading. — Roland Barthes

The discourse on the Text should itself be nothing other than text, research, textual activity, since the Text is that social space which leaves no language safe, outside, nor any subject of the enunciation in position as judge, master, analyst, confessor, decoder. The theory of the Text can coincide only with a practice of writing. — Roland Barthes

Literature is like phosphorus: it shines with its maximum brilliance and the moment when it attempts to die. — Roland Barthes

I want a History of Looking. For the Photograph is the advent of myself as other: a cunning dissociation of consciousness from identity. Even odder: it was before Photography that men had the most to say about the vision of the double. Heautoscopy was compared with an hallucinosis; for centuries this was a great mythic theme. — Roland Barthes

Henceforth I would have to cosent to combine two voices: the voice of banality (to say what everyone sees and knows) and the voice of singularity (to replenish such banality with all the élan of an emotion which belonged only to myself). — Roland Barthes

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, even in the areas of the bourgeois and the proletariat, what's left of them. — Roland Barthes

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

Physically, the Ventoux is dreadful. Bald, it's the spirit of Dry: Its climate (it is much more an essence of climate than a geographic place) makes it a damned terrain, a testing place for heroes, something like a higher hell. — Roland Barthes

The photograph is literally an emanation of the referent. From a real body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me, who am here; the duration of the transmission is insignificant; the photograph of the missing being, as Sontag says, will touch me like the delayed rays of a star. — Roland Barthes

Eiffel saw his Tower in the form of a serious object, rational, useful; men return it to him in the form of a great baroque dream which quite naturally touches on the borders of the irrational ... architecture is always dream and function, expression of a utopia and instrument of a convenience. — Roland Barthes

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

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

Thus every writer's motto reads: mad I cannot be, sane I do not deign to be, neurotic I am. — Roland Barthes

The haiku reproduces the designating gesture of the child pointing at whatever it is (the haiku shows no partiality for the subject), merely saying: that! — Roland Barthes

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

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. — Roland Barthes

The New is not a fashion, it is a value. — Roland Barthes

The face of Garbo is an Idea, that of Hepburn an Event. — Roland Barthes

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

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

The Ventoux is a god of Evil, to which sacrifices must be made. It never forgives weakness and extracts an unfair tribute of suffering. — Roland Barthes

For me the noise of Time is not sad: I love bells, clocks, watches — and I recall that at first photographic implements were related to techniques of cabinetmaking and the machinery of precision: 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

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

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

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

Architecture is always dream and function, expression of a utopia and instrument of a convenience. — Roland Barthes

Death of the Father would deprive literature of many of its pleasures. If there is no longer a Father, why tell stories? Doesn't every narrative lead back to Oedipus? Isn't storytelling always a way of searching for one's origin, speaking one's conflicts with the Law, entering into the dialectic of tenderness and hatred? — Roland Barthes

Literature is that which he can not read without pain, without choking on truth. — Roland Barthes

The lover's fatal identity is precisely this: I am the one who waits. — Roland Barthes

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

In 1850, August Salzmann photographed, near Jerusalem, the road to Beith-Lehem (as it was spelled at the time): nothing but stony ground, olive trees; but three tenses dizzy my consciousness: my present, the time of Jesus, and that of the photographer, all this under the instance of 'reality' - and no longer through the elaborations of the text, whether fictional or poetic, which itself is never credible down to the root. — Roland Barthes

If I acknowledge my dependency, I do so because for me it is a means of signifying my demand: in the realm of love, futility is not a "weakness" or an "absurdity": it is a strong sign: the more futile, the more it signifies and the more it asserts itself as strength.) — Roland Barthes

Frontiers are physical as well as symbolic constructions — Roland Barthes

This endured absence is nothing more or less than forgetfulness. I am, intermittently, unfaithful. This is the condition of my survival. — Roland Barthes

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. — Roland Barthes

To eat, to speak, to sing (need we add: to kiss?) are operations which have the same site of the body for origin. — Roland Barthes

The unary Photograph has every reason to be banal, 'unity' of composition being the first rule of vulgar (and notably, of academic) rhetoric: 'The subject,' says one handbook for amateur photographers, 'must be simple, free of useless accessories; this is called the Search for Unity. — Roland Barthes

Take the gesture, the action of writing. I have an almost obsessive relation to writing instruments. I often switch from one pen to another just for the pleasure of it. I try out new ones. I have far too many pens - I don't know what to do with all of them! And yet, as soon as I see a new one, I start craving it. I cannot keep myself from buying them. — Roland Barthes

Where you are tender, you speak your plural. — Roland Barthes

We know that the war against intelligence is always waged in the name of common sense. — Roland Barthes

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

We don't forget, but something vacant settles in us. — Roland Barthes

How does meaning get into the image? Where does it end? And if it ends, what is there beyond? — Roland Barthes

Who speaks is not who writes, and who writes is not who is. — Roland Barthes

Ensnared in his starvation, Chaplin-man is always just below political awareness. A strike is a catastrophe for him because it threatens a man truly blinded by his hunger; this man achieves an awareness of the working-class condition only when the poor man and the proletarian coincide under the gaze (and the blows) of the police. — Roland Barthes

Every photograph is a certificate of presence. — Roland Barthes

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. Far from the details of his daily life bringing nearer to me the nature of his inspiration and making it clearer, it is the whole mystical singularity of his condition which the writer emphasizes by such confidences. For I cannot but ascribe to some superhumanly the existence of beings vast enough to wear blue pajamas at the very moment when they manifest themselves as universal conscience. — Roland Barthes

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

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

Usually the amateur is defined as an immature state of the artist: someone who cannot — or will not — achieve the mastery of a profession. But in the field of photographic practice, it is the amateur, on the contrary, who is the assumption of the professional: for it is he who stands closer to the (i)noeme(i) of Photography. — Roland Barthes

It must always be considered as though spoken by a character in a novel — Roland Barthes

To 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 (the other), to know that writing compensates for nothing, sublimates nothing, that it is precisely there where you are not--this is the beginning of writing. — Roland Barthes

Flaubert had infinite correction to perform. — Roland Barthes

The Text is not a definitive object. — Roland Barthes

Literature can no longer be either Mimesis or Mathesis but merely Semiosis, the adventure of what is impossible to language, in a word: Text (it is wrong to say that the notion of 'text' repeats the notion of 'literature': literature represents a finite world, the text figures the infinite of language). — Roland Barthes

When we define the Photograph as a motionless image, this does not mean only that the figures it represents do not move; it means that they do not (i)emerge(i), do not (i)leave(i): they are anesthetized and fastened down, like butterflies. — Roland Barthes

Today there is no symbolic compensation for old age, no recognition of a specific value: wisdom, perceptiveness, experience, vision. — Roland Barthes

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

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

I am simultaneously and contradictorily both happy and unhappy: 'to succeed' or 'to fail' have for me only ephemeral, contingent meanings (this does not stop my desires and sorrows from being violent ones); what impels me, secretly and obstinately, is not tactical: I accept and I affirm, irrespective of the true and the false, of success and failure; I am withdrawn from all finality, I live according to chance. — Roland Barthes

The Text is plural. Which is not simply to say that it has several meanings, but that it accomplishes the very plural of meaning: an irreducible (and not merely an acceptable) plural. The Text is not a co-existence of meanings but a passage, an overcrossing; thus it answers not to an interpretation, even a liberal one, but to an explosion, a dissemination. — Roland Barthes

One day, quite some time ago, I happened on a photograph of Napoleon’s youngest brother, Jerome, taken in 1852. And I realized then, with an amazement I have not been able to lessen since: ‘I am looking at eyes that looked at the Emperor.’ Sometimes I would mention this amazement, but since no one seemed to share it, nor even to understand it (life consists of these little touches of solitude), I forgot about it. — Roland Barthes

Those who fail to reread are obliged to read the same story everywhere. — Roland Barthes

The necessary condition for an image is sight. — Roland Barthes

He who reads a story only once is condemned to read the same story his whole life. — Roland Barthes

Tout ce qui est anachronique est obsce' ne. Everything anachronistic is obscene. — Roland Barthes

A picture is never anything but its own plural description. — Roland Barthes

Life Lessons by Roland Barthes

1. Roland Barthes emphasizes the importance of understanding the power of language and its ability to shape our interpretations of reality.
2. He also encourages us to be mindful of the ways in which we are influenced by the media and to be aware of our own biases.
3. Lastly, he encourages us to embrace the complexities of life and to be open to new ways of looking at the world.