Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Roland Barthes
Age: 64 †
Born: 1915
Born: November 12
Died: 1980
Died: March 25
Diarist
Essayist
Linguist
Literary Critic
Literary Scholar
Literary Theorist
Mythographer
Non-Fiction Writer
Philosopher
Screenwriter
Roland Gérard Barthes
Translations
Skin
Skins
Fingers
Instead
Words
Language
Desire
Trembles

More quotes by Roland Barthes

Image
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
Image
If I had to create a god, I would lend him a “slow understanding”: a kind of drip-by-drip understanding of problems. People who understand quickly frighten me.
Roland Barthes
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Flaubert had infinite correction to perform.
Roland Barthes
Image
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
Image
One must turn the tongue seven times in the mouth before speaking.
Roland Barthes
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.
Roland Barthes
Image
Those who fail to reread are obliged to read the same story everywhere.
Roland Barthes
Image
What love lays bare in me is energy.
Roland Barthes
Image
To dope the racer is as criminal, as sacrilegious, as trying to imitate God it is stealing from God the privilege of the spark.
Roland Barthes
Image
As Spectator I wanted to explore photography not as a question (a theme) but as a wound.
Roland Barthes
Image
What the Photograph reproduces to infinity has occurred only once: the Photograph mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentially.
Roland Barthes
Image
To eat steak rare . . . represents both a nature and a morality.
Roland Barthes
Image
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
Image
A photograph is always invisible, it is not it that we see.
Roland Barthes
Image
Ultimately, Photography is subversive, not when it frightens, repels, or even stigmatizes, but when it is pensive, when it thinks.
Roland Barthes
Image
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
Image
A light without shadow generates an emotion without reserve.
Roland Barthes
Image
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