Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes by Roland Barthes (French Literary Theorist)

Roland Barthes (1915–80,) fully Roland Gérard Barthes, was a French literary theorist, essayist, philosopher, critic, and semiotician. He was a leading exponent of Structuralism and semiology in literary criticism. His later works were influential in the development of deconstruction and post-structuralism.

Born in Cherbourg, Barthes began to write after researching and teaching. His collection of essays entitled Le Degré zéro de l’écriture (1953; Writing Degree Zero, 1967) immediately established him as France’s leading critic of Modernist literature. His literary criticism avoided the traditional value judgments and investigation of the author’s intentions, addressing itself instead of analyzing the text as a system of signs or symbols whose underlying structure and interconnections form the ‘meaning’ of the work as a whole.

Despite criticism from more traditional scholars, Barthes continued with this method and produced Mythologies (1957,) a semiological exploration of such diverse cultural phenomena as wrestling, children’s toys, and film stars’ faces. Though influenced by Marxism, Sigmund Freud, Existentialism, and Structuralism, he remained a versatile individualist and a fierce critic of what he saw as stale and oppressive bourgeois thinking.

For 16 years, Barthes was a member of the faculty of the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris. From 1976, he was a professor of literary semiology at the Collège de France. He continued to produce witty and thought-provoking books, including an imaginative autobiography, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes (1977.) He gained international recognition as a developer of semiology and Structuralism.

More: Wikipedia READ: Works by Roland Barthes

Literature is without proofs. By which it must be understood that it cannot prove, not only what it says, but even that it is worth the trouble of saying it.
Roland Barthes
Topics: Literature, Books

Other countries drink to get drunk, and this is accepted by everyone; in France, drunkenness is a consequence, never an intention. A drink is felt as the spinning out of a pleasure, not as the necessary cause of an effect which is sought: wine is not only a philter, it is also the leisurely act of drinking.
Roland Barthes
Topics: Alcoholism, Alcohol

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
Topics: Cynicism

The New is not a fashion, it is a value.
Roland Barthes
Topics: Fashion

Historically and politically, the petit-bourgeois is the key to the century. The bourgeois and proletariat classes have become abstractions: the petite-bourgeoisie, in contrast, is everywhere, you can see it everywhere, even in the areas of the bourgeois and the proletariat, what’s left of them.
Roland Barthes
Topics: Class

To hide a passion totally (or even to hide, more simply, its excess) is inconceivable: not because the human subject is too weak, but because passion is in essence made to be seen: the hiding must be seen: I want you to know that I am hiding something from you, that is the active paradox I must resolve: at one and the same time it must be known and not known: I want you to know that I don’t want to show my feelings: that is the message I address to the other.
Roland Barthes
Topics: Passion

Myth is neither a lie nor a confession: it is an inflexion.
Roland Barthes

All official institutions of language are repeating machines: school, sports, advertising, popular songs, news, all continually repeat the same structure, the same meaning, often the same words: the stereotype is a political fact, the major figure of ideology.
Roland Barthes
Topics: Language

The politician being interviewed clearly takes a great deal of trouble to imagine an ending to his sentence: and if he stopped short? His entire policy would be jeopardized!
Roland Barthes

Wine is a part of society because it provides a basis not only for a morality but also for an environment; it is an ornament in the slightest ceremonials of French daily life, from the snack to the feast, from the conversation at the local cafe to the speech at a formal dinner.
Roland Barthes
Topics: Wine

Literature is the question minus the answer.
Roland Barthes
Topics: Literature

What the public wants is the image of passion, not passion itself.
Roland Barthes
Topics: Passion

To endow the writer publicly with a good fleshly body, to reveal that he likes dry white wine and underdone steak, is to make even more miraculous for me, and of a more divine essence, the products of his art. Far from the details of his daily life bringing nearer to me the nature of his inspiration and making it clearer, it is the whole mystical singularity of his condition which the writer emphasizes by such confidences. For I cannot but ascribe to some superhumanly the existence of beings vast enough to wear blue pajamas at the very moment when they manifest themselves as universal conscience.
Roland Barthes
Topics: Authors & Writing, Writing, Writers

This is a perfect world
I’m riding on an incline
I’m staring in your face
You’ll photograph mine
Roland Barthes
Topics: Photography

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
Topics: Liberalism

There is only one way left to escape the alienation of present day society: to retreat ahead of it.
Roland Barthes

The bastard form of mass culture is humiliated repetition… always new books, new programs, new films, news items, but always the same meaning.
Roland Barthes
Topics: Society

There are people who think that wrestling is an ignoble sport. Wrestling is not sport, it is a spectacle, and it is no more ignoble to attend a wrestled performance of suffering than a performance of the sorrows of Arnolphe or Andromaque.
Roland Barthes
Topics: Sports

The photographic image … is a message without a code.
Roland Barthes
Topics: Photography, One liners

The face of Garbo is an Idea, that of Hepburn an Event.
Roland Barthes
Topics: Acting, Actors

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
Topics: Love

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
Topics: Pleasure

I think that cars today are almost the exact equivalent of the great Gothic cathedrals: I mean the supreme creation of an era, conceived with passion by unknown artists, and consumed in image if not in usage by a whole population which appropriates them as a purely magical object.
Roland Barthes

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
Topics: Language

Language is legislation, speech is its code. We do not see the power which is in speech because we forget that all speech is a classification, and that all classifications are oppressive.
Roland Barthes
Topics: Conversation, Language, Speech

I call the discourse of power any discourse that engenders blame, hence guilt, in its recipient.
Roland Barthes
Topics: Power

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