Roland Barthes Quotes About Desire

Quotes about: Desire

• 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

  Desire, Skins, Language And Power

  "A Lover's Discourse (Talking)". Bok by Roland Barthes, 1977.

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

  Roland Barthes

  Desire, Encounters, Body

  Roland Barthes (1990). “A lover's discourse: fragments”, Penguin Books

• I have not a desire but a need for solitude.

  Roland Barthes

  Solitude, Desire, Needs

• Isn’t desire always the same, whether the object is present or absent? Isn’t the object always absent? —This isn’t the same languor: there are two words: Pothos, desire for the absent being, and Himéros, the more burning desire for the present being.

  Roland Barthes

  Two, Desire, Burning

• 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

  Strong, Struggle, Joy

  Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag (1983). “Barthes: Selected Writings”

• The Photograph belongs to that class of laminated objects whose two leaves cannot be separated without destroying them both: the windowpane and the landscape, and why not: Good and Evil, desire and its object: dualities we can conceive but not perceive... Whatever it grants to vision and whatever its manner, a photograph is always invisible: it is not it that we see.

  Roland Barthes

  Photography, Class, Two

• I am simultaneously and contradictorily both happy and unhappy: 'to succeed' or 'to fail' have for me only ephemeral, contingent meanings (this does not stop my desires and sorrows from being violent ones); what impels me, secretly and obstinately, is not tactical: I accept and I affirm, irrespective of the true and the false, of success and failure; I am withdrawn from all finality, I live according to chance.

  Roland Barthes

  Sorrow, Unhappy, Desire

• 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).

  Roland Barthes

  Writing, Desire, Language

• I cannot classify the other, for the other is, precisely, Unique, the singular Image which has miraculously come to correspond to the speciality of my desire. The other is the figure of my truth, and cannot be imprisoned in any stereotype (which is the truth of others).

  Roland Barthes

  Unique, Desire, Stereotype

  Roland Barthes (1990). “A lover's discourse: fragments”, Penguin Books

• One of the marks of our world is perhaps this reversal: we live according to a generalized image-repertoire. Consider the United Sates, where everything is transformed into images: only images exist and are produced and are consumes ... Such a reversal necessarily raises the ethical question: not that the image is immoral, irreligious, or diabolic (as some have declared it, upon the advent of the Photograph), but because, when generalized, it completely de-realizes the human world of conflicts and desires, under cover of illustrating it.

  Roland Barthes

  Ethical Questions, Our World, Desire

• Is the scene always visual? It can be aural, the frame can be linguistic: I can fall in love with a sentence spoken to me: and not only because it says something which manages to touch my desire, but because of its syntactical turn (framing), which will inhabit me like a memory.

  Roland Barthes

  Falling In Love, Memories, Desire

  Roland Barthes (1990). “A lover's discourse: fragments”, Penguin Books

• facebook
• twitter
• googleplus
• email
• linkedin

• facebook
• twitter
• googleplus
• email
• linkedin