1001Philosophers

Roland Barthes Quotes

Roland Barthes was a French literary theorist, semiotician, and essayist. His Mythologies submitted the codes of everyday French life to a structural reading, while Elements of Semiology and S/Z developed and then contested the structuralist project. The quotes below are attributed to Roland Barthes, organized by topic.

Roland Barthes on Love

  • Attributed to Roland Barthes:

    “Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other.”

  • Attributed to Roland Barthes:

    “What love lays bare in me is energy.”

  • Attributed to Roland Barthes:

    “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.”

Roland Barthes on Truth

  • Attributed to Roland Barthes:

    “The death of the author is the birth of the reader.”

  • Attributed to Roland Barthes:

    “Literature is the question minus the answer.”

  • Attributed to Roland Barthes:

    “The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centers of culture.”

Read all Roland Barthes quotes on Truth