338 Quotes by Roland Barthes

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

When we look at a photograph of ourselves or of others, we are really looking at the return of the dead.

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

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.

Where you are tender, you speak your plural.

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).

The Text is not a definitive object.

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

To make someone wait: the constant prerogative of all power.