Quote

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

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
Mort
Tout
Refusal
Language
Death

More quotes by Roland Barthes

Image
Is not the most erotic part of the body wherever the clothing affords a glimpse?
Roland Barthes
Image
Tout ce qui est anachronique est obsce' ne. Everything anachronistic is obscene.
Roland Barthes
Image
Literature is that which he can not read without pain, without choking on truth.
Roland Barthes
Image
One must turn the tongue seven times in the mouth before speaking.
Roland Barthes
Image
Every photograph is a certificate of presence.
Roland Barthes
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
A light without shadow generates an emotion without reserve.
Roland Barthes
Image
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
Image
I love you is unsubtle. It removes explanations, facilities, degrees, scruples.
Roland Barthes
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Literature is like phosphorus: it shines with its maximum brilliance and the moment when it attempts to die.
Roland Barthes
Image
There is only one way left to escape the alienation of present day society: to retreat ahead of it.
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
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
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
Those who fail to reread are obliged to read the same story everywhere.
Roland Barthes
Image
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