Roland Barthes Sayings and Quotes

Below you will find our collection of inspirational, wise, and humorous old Roland Barthes quotes, Roland Barthes sayings, and Roland Barthes proverbs, collected over the years from a variety of sources.'

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
Literature is the question minus the answer. Roland Barthes
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
A photograph is always invisible, it is not it that we see. 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
One must turn the tongue seven times in the mouth before speaking. Roland Barthes
That ambiguous area of culture where something unfailingly political, though separate from the political choices of the day, infiltrates judgment and language. Roland Barthes
The photographic image is a message without a code. Roland Barthes
The skyscraper establishes the block, the block creates the street, the street offers itself to man. Roland Barthes
There is only one way left to escape the alienation of present day society: to retreat ahead of it. Roland Barthes
In the hierarchy of the major poetic substances, it [plastic] figures as a disgraced material, lost between the effusiveness of rubber and the flat hardness of metal. Roland Barthes
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
Where you are tender, you speak your plural. Roland Barthes
To eat steak rare... represents both a nature and a morality. Roland Barthes
The best principals are not heroes; they are hero makers. Roland Barthes
To eat steak rare represents both a nature and a morality. 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
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
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 from you, that is the active paradox I must resolve: at one and the same time it must be known and not known: I want you to know that I don't want to show my feelings: that is the message I address to the other. Roland Barthes
Such is life, falling over seven times and getting up eight. Roland Barthes
Ultimately, Photography is subversive, not when it frightens, repels, or even stigmatizes, but when it is pensive, when it thinks. Roland Barthes