86 Inspirational Quotes By Roland Barthes That Will Touch Every Aspect Of Your Life
Roland Barthes was a pioneer literary theorist, philosopher and linguist whose works had a profound impact on structuralism, semiotics and anthropology. Here are a few interesting facts from the life of this renowned mythologist.
He wrote on a variety of faux passes -- plastic, strip tease, wrestling, steak and chips and “the new Citroen" -- existing in the twentieth century to disenchant citizens against advertising.
The theorist used everyday objects such as mushrooming brands of detergents to explain consumerism and how businesses are exploiting people through advertising.
The essayist was a huge fan of Havana cigars and one could easily spot him with a stick.
Barthes was vocal against the abuse of advertisement. Ironically, he was killed by a laundry truck which bore a banner advertising the laundry. He met with the fatal accident while he was returning from the lunch hosted by future President of France Francois Mitterrand.
In the segment below we bring to you inspirational quotes by the famous French literary theorist Roland Barthes.
I am interested in language because it wounds or seduces me.
Each of us has his own rhythm of suffering.
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.
I encounter millions of bodies in my life; of these millions, I may desire some hundreds; but of these hundreds, I love only one.
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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...?
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?
...language is never innocent.
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... always new books, new programs, new films, news items, but always the same meaning.
The lover's fatal identity is precisely this: I am the one who waits.
…the book creates meaning, the meaning creates life.
This endured absence is nothing more or less than forgetfulness. I am, intermittently, unfaithful. This is the condition of my survival.
Don't say mourning. It's too psychoanalytic. I'm not mourning. I'm suffering.
I make the other’s absence responsible for my worldliness.
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.
To make someone wait: the constant prerogative of all power, "age-old pastime of humanity".
We know that the war against intelligence is always waged in the name of common sense.
Writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin.
All of a sudden it didn't bother me not being modern.
The incapacity to name is a good symptom of disturbance.
I have not a desire but a need for solitude.
What love lays bare in me is energy.
Literature is that which he can not read without pain, without choking on truth.
Every exploration is an appropriation.
As a language, Garbo's singularity was of the order of the concept, that of Audrey Hepburn is of the order of the substance; the face of Garbo is an Idea, that of Hepburn, an Event.
All those young photographers who are at work in the world, determined upon the capture of actuality, do not know that they are agents of Death.
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.
What I claim is to live to the full the contradiction of my time, which may well make sarcasm the condition of truth.
Suicide How would I know I don’t suffer any more, if I’m dead?
We don’t forget, but something vacant settles in us.
