Roland Barthes Quotes

“What love lays bare in me is energy.”

"Talking," in A Lover's Discourse (1977)

“… language is never innocent.”

Source: A Lover's Discourse: Fragments

“mad I cannot be, sane I do not deign to be, neurotic I am.”

“A work has two levels of meaning: literal and concealed.”

“The Text is plural. Which is not simply to say that it has several meanings, but that it accomplishes the very plural of meaning: an irreducible (and not merely an acceptable) plural.”

Proposition 3
Variant translation: The Text can be approached, experienced, in reaction to the sign. The work closes on a signified. There are two modes of signification which can be attributed to this signified: either it is claimed to be evident and the work is then the object of a literal science, of philology, or else it is considered to be secret, ultimate, something to be sought out, and the work then falls under the scope of a hermeneutics, of an interpretation
From Work to Text (1971)
Context: A work has two levels of meaning: literal and concealed.
A Text, on the other hand is engaged in a movement … a deferral … a dilation of meaning … the play of signification.
Metonymy — the association of part to whole — characterized the logic of the Text.
In this sense the Text is "radically symbolic" and lacks closure.

“Someone tells me: this kind of love is not viable. But how can you evaluate viability? Why is the viable a Good Thing? Why is it better to last than to burn?”

Proposition 4
From Work to Text (1971)
Context: The Text is plural. Which is not simply to say that it has several meanings, but that it accomplishes the very plural of meaning: an irreducible (and not merely an acceptable) plural. The Text is not a co-existence of meanings but a passage, an overcrossing; thus it answers not to an interpretation, even a liberal one, but to an explosion, a dissemination.

Roland Barthes Quotes about love

“I encounter millions of bodies in my life; of these millions, I may desire some hundreds; but of these hundreds, I love only one.”

Source: A Lover's Discourse: Fragments

“Isn’t the most sensitive point of this mourning the fact that I must lose a language — the amorous language? No more ‘I love you’s.”

Source: A Lover's Discourse: Fragments

“To whom could I put this question (with any hope of an answer)? Does being able to live without someone you loved mean you loved her less than you thought…?”

Source: A Lover's Discourse: Fragments

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

Roland Barthes Quotes

“The theory of the Text can coincide only with a practice of writing.”

Source: The Pleasure of the Text

“Each of us has his own rhythm of suffering.”

Conclusion
From Work to Text (1971)
Context: The discourse on the Text should itself be nothing other than text, research, textual activity, since the Text is that social space which leaves no language safe, outside, nor any subject of the enunciation in position as judge, master, analyst, confessor, decoder. The theory of the Text can coincide only with a practice of writing.

“What the Photograph reproduces to infinity has occurred only once: the Photograph mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentially.”

“The bastard form of mass culture is humiliated repetition: content, ideological schema, the blurring of contradictions—these are repeated, but the superficial forms are varied: always new books, new programs, new films, news items, but always the same meaning.”

Source: Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography

“The lover's fatal identity is precisely this: I am the one who waits.”

La forme bâtarde de la culture de masse est la répétition honteuse: on répète les contenus, les schèmes idéologiques, le gommage des contradictions, mais on varie les formes superficielles: toujours des livres, des émissions, des films nouveaux, des faits divers, mais toujours le même sens.
"Modern," in The Pleasure of the Text (1975)

“When we define the Photograph as a motionless image, this does not mean only that the figures it represents do not move; it means that they do not (i)emerge(i), do not (i)leave(i): they are anesthetized and fastened down, like butterflies.”

Source: A Lover's Discourse: Fragments

“Don't say mourning. It's too psychoanalytic. I'm not mourning. I'm suffering.”

Source: Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography

“…the book creates meaning, the meaning creates life.”

Source: Mourning Diary

“This endured absence is nothing more or less than forgetfulness. I am, intermittently, unfaithful. This is the condition of my survival.”

Source: The Pleasure of the Text

“We know that the war against intelligence is always waged in the name of common sense.”

Source: A Lover's Discourse: Fragments

Roland Barthes book Mythologies

Source: Mythologies

“I make the other’s absence responsible for my worldliness.”

“The text you write must prove to me that it desires me. This proof exists: it is writing. Writing is: the science of the various blisses of language, its Kama Sutra (this science has but one treatise: writing itself).”

Source: A Lover's Discourse: Fragments

“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., nothing but mutations.”

Source: The Pleasure of the Text

“To make someone wait: the constant prerogative of all power, "age-old pastime of humanity".”

Source: Roland Barthes

“The incapacity to name is a good symptom of disturbance.”

Source: A Lover's Discourse: Fragments

“Writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin.”

Source: Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography

“All of a sudden it didn't bother me not being modern.”

“I have not a desire but a need for solitude.”

“Literature is that which he can not read without pain, without choking on truth.”

Source: Mourning Diary

“In an initial period, Photography, in order to surprise, photographs the notable; but soon, by a familiar reversal, it decrees notable whatever it photographs. The 'anything whatever' then becomes the sophisticated acme of value.”

“Every exploration is an appropriation.”

Source: Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography

Roland Barthes book The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies

Source: The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies

“Encratic language (the language produced and spread under the protection of power) is statutorily a language of repetition; all official institutions of language are repeating machines: schools, sports, advertising, popular songs, news, all continually repeat the same structure, the same meaning, often the same words.”

“What the public wants is the image of passion, not passion itself.”

The Pleasure of the Text (1975)

“Whereas the work is understood to be traceable to a source (through a process of derivation or "filiation"), the Text is without a source — the "author" a mere "guest" at the reading of the Text.”

"Le monde où l'on catche," in Mythologies (1957)

“The Text is not a definitive object.”

Proposition 5
From Work to Text (1971)

“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!”

Proposition 1
Variant translation: The Text is not to be thought of as an object that can be computed. It would be futile to try to separate out materially works from texts.
From Work to Text (1971)

“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.”

"Sentence," in The Pleasure of the Text (1975)