338 Quotes by Roland Barthes

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.

Frontiers are physical as well as symbolic constructions.

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...

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...

I pass lightly through the reactionary darkness.

A cold winter night. I’m warm enough, yet I’m alone. And I realize that I’ll ‘have’ to get used to existing quite ‘naturally’ within the solitude, functioning there, working there, accompanied by, ‘fastened to’ the “presence of absence.

Don’t say mourning. It’s too psychoanalytic. I’m not mourning. I’m suffering.

The realists do not take the photograph for a ‘copy’ of reality, but for an emanation of past reality, a magic, not an art.

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.