“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.”

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

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 10, 2024. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "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 …" by Roland Barthes?
Roland Barthes photo
Roland Barthes 39
French philosopher, critic and literary theorist 1915–1980

Related quotes

Théodore Rousseau photo

“I heard the voices of the trees; the surprises of their movements. Their varieties of form and even their peculiarity of attraction toward the light had suddenly revealed to me the language of the forest. All that world of flora lived as mutes, whose signs I divined, whose passions I discovered. I wished to converse with them and to be able to say to myself, through that other language, painting, that I had put my finger upon the secret of their grandeur.”

Théodore Rousseau (1812–1867) French painter (1812-1867)

quote from a talk between Th. Rousseau and Alfred Sensier, 1850's; as cited in Barbizon days, Millet-Corot-Rousseau-Barye by Charles Sprague Smith, A. Wessels Company, New York, July 1902, p. 147
Alfred Sensier frequently visited the studio of Th. Rousseau (and Millet) and wrote later a book about both artists
1851 - 1867

“I have no words. Sixteen languages, but no words.
-Vishous”

Jessica Bird (1969) U.S. novelist

Source: Lover Unleashed

Bram van Velde photo

“I don’t set out to speak a comprehensible language. But my language is authentic.”

Bram van Velde (1895–1981) Dutch painter

1960's, Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram van Velde' (1965 - 1969)

Albert Einstein photo

“The words or the language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

Answer to a survey written by the French mathematician Jaques Hadamard, from Hadamard's An Essay on the Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field (1945). Reprinted in Ideas and Opinions (1954). His full set of answers to the questions can be read on p. 3 here http://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/Goodies/Einstein_think/index.html.
1940s
Context: The words or the language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought. The psychical entities which seem to serve as elements in thoughts are certain signs and more or less clear images which can be "voluntarily" reproduced and combined. There is, of course, a certain connection between those elements and relevant logical concepts. It is also clear that the desire to arrive finally at logically connected concepts is the emotional basis of this rather vague play with the above-mentioned elements.... The above-mentioned elements are, in my case, of visual and some muscular type. Conventional words or other signs have to be sought for laboriously only in a secondary stage, when the mentioned associative play is sufficiently established and can be reproduced at will.

Terrance Hayes photo

“I too, having lost faith
in language, have placed my faith in language.”

Terrance Hayes (1971) American poet

Lighthead (2010), "Snow for Wallace Stevens"

Ludwig Wittgenstein photo

“The world is my world: this is manifest in the fact that the limits of language (of that language which alone I understand) mean the limits of my world.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) Austrian-British philosopher

1920s, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922)
Context: This remark provides the key to the problem, how much truth there is in solipsism. For what the solipsist means is quite correct; only it cannot be said, but makes itself manifest. The world is my world: this is manifest in the fact that the limits of language (of that language which alone I understand) mean the limits of my world. (5.62)

Carson Cistulli photo
Ratko Mladić photo

“If humankind were to follow my advice and if it were in my power, I wouldn't allow the word 'war' to be uttered in any language, I would ban all weapons, even in the form of toys.”

Ratko Mladić (1943) Commander of the Bosnian Serb military

From interview with Robert Block, 1995
Interviews (1993 – 1995)

Lata Mangeshkar photo

Related topics