The portrait-photograph is a closed field of forces. Four image-repertoires intersect here, oppose and distort each other. In front of the lens, I am at the same time: the one I think I am, the one I want others to think I am, the one the photographer thinks I am, and the one he makes use of to exhibit his art.

— Roland Barthes

Roland Barthes Quotes

Despite the difficulties of my story, despite discomforts, doubts, despairs, despite impulses to be done with it, I unceasingly affirm love, within myself, as a value. Though I listen to all the arguments which the most divergent systems employ to demystify, to limit, to erase, in short, to depreciate love, I persist, “I know, I know, but all the same...

— Roland Barthes

To induce a collective content for the imagination is always an inhuman undertaking, not only because dreaming essentializes life into destiny, but also because dreams are impoverished, and the alibi of an absence.

— Roland Barthes

The gift is contact, sensuality: you will be touching what I have touched, a third skin unites us.

— Roland Barthes

Like a kind of melancholy mirage, the other withdraws into infinity and I wear myself out trying to get there.

— Roland Barthes

Suffering; impossibility of being comfortable anywhere; oppression, irritations and remorse one after the next, everything under the sign “wretchedness of man,” used by Pascal.

— Roland Barthes

But isn’t desire always the same, whether the object is present or absent? Isn’t the object always absent?

— Roland Barthes

A man who wants the truth is never answered save in strong, highly colored images, which nonetheless turn ambiguous, indecisive, once he tries to transform them into signs, as in any manticism, the consulting lover must make his own truth.

— Roland Barthes

The photograph touches me if I withdraw it from its usual blah-blah: “Technique,” “Reality,” “Reportage,” “Art,” etc.: to say nothing, to shut my eyes, to allow the detail to rise of its own accord into affective consciousness.

— Roland Barthes

The true act of mourning is not to suffer from the loss of the loved object; it is to discern one day, on the skin of the relationship, a certain tiny stain, appearing there as the symptom of a certain death : for the first time I am doing harm to the one I love, involuntarily, of course, but without panic.

— Roland Barthes

Here and there, on the trees, some leaves remain. And I often stand deep in thought before them. I contemplate a leaf and attach my hope to it. When the wind plays with the leaf, I tremble in every limb. And if it should fall, alas, my hope falls with it.” – Schubert.

— Roland Barthes

Depression comes when, in the depths of despair, I cannot manage to save myself by my attachment to writing.

— Roland Barthes

Language is never innocent.

— Roland Barthes

However paradoxical it may seem, myth hides nothing: its function is to distort, not to make disappear.

— Roland Barthes

And, long after the amorous relation is allayed, I keep the habit of hallucinating the being I have loved: sometimes I am still in anxiety over a telephone call that is late, and no matter who is on the line, I imagine I recognize the voice I once loved: I am an amputee who still feels pain in his missing leg.

— Roland Barthes

Myth does not deny thing, on the contrary, its function is to talk about them; simply, it purifies them, it makes them innocent, it gives them a natural and eternal justification, it gives them a clarity which is not that of an explanation but of a statement of fact.

— Roland Barthes

We are all potential Dominicis, not as murderers but as accused, deprived of language, or worse, rigged out in that of our accusers, humiliated and condemned by it. To rob a man of his language in the very name of language: this is the first step in all legal murder.

— Roland Barthes

I’m cold,” the lover says, “let’s go back,” but there is no road, no way, the boat is wrecked.

— Roland Barthes

In this mythology of seafaring, there is only one means to exorcise the possessive nature of the man on a ship; it is to eliminate the man and to leave the ship on its own. The ship then is no longer a box, a habitat, an object that is owned; it becomes a travelling eye, which comes close to the infinite; it constantly begets departures.

— Roland Barthes

The picturesque is found any time the ground is uneven.

— Roland Barthes

Tautology creates a dead, a motionless world.

— Roland Barthes
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