Top 20 Quotes by Roland Barthes

The photographic image... is a message without a code.

The skyscraper establishes the block, the block creates the street, the street offers itself to man.

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.

A photograph is always invisible, it is not it that we see.

The New is not a fashion, it is a value.

To eat steak rare... represents both a nature and a morality.

There is only one way left to escape the alienation of present day society: to retreat ahead of it.

Literature is the question minus the answer.

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

To try to write love is to confront the muck of language: that region of hysteria where language is both too much and too little, excessive and impoverished.