If I had to create a god, I would lend him a “slow understanding”: a kind of drip-by-drip understanding of problems. People who understand quickly frighten me.
ROLAND BARTHESThe Ventoux is a god of Evil, to which sacrifices must be made. It never forgives weakness and extracts an unfair tribute of suffering.
More Roland Barthes Quotes
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The lover who does not forget sometimes dies from excess, fatigue, and the strain of memory (like Werther).
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We don’t forget, but something vacant settles in us.
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I call the discourse of power any discourse that engenders blame, hence guilt, in its recipient.
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The politician being interviewed clearly takes a great deal of trouble to imagine an ending to his sentence: and if he stopped short? His entire policy would be jeopardized!
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Language is neither reactionary nor progressive; it is quite simply fascist; for fascism does not prevent speech, it compels speech.
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Touch is the most demystifying of all senses, different from sight which is the most magical.
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Language is never innocent.
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In front of the photograph of my mother as a child, I tell myself: she is going to die: I shudder, like winnicott’s psychotic patient, over a catastrophe which has already occurred. Whether or not the subject is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe.
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Man does not exist prior to language, either as a species or as an individual.
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Whereas the work is understood to be traceable to a source (through a process of derivation or “filiation”), the Text is without a source – the “author” a mere “guest” at the reading of the Text.
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As Spectator I wanted to explore photography not as a question (a theme) but as a wound.
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Myth is neither a lie nor a confession: it is an inflexion.
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The new is not a fashion, it is a value.
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A light without shadow generates an emotion without reserve.
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The author enters into his own death, writing begins.
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When we look at a photograph of ourselves or of others, we are really looking at the return of the dead.
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It is no longer the sexual which is indecent, it is the sentimental.
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Language is legislation, speech is its code. We do not see the power which is in speech because we forget that all speech is a classification, and that all classifications are oppressive.
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Every new Fashion is a refusal to inherit, a subversion against the oppression of the preceding Fashion; Fashion experiences itself as a Right, the natural right of the present over the past.
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Ultimately, Photography is subversive, not when it frightens, repels, or even stigmatizes, but when it is pensive, when it thinks.
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The art of living has no history: it does not evolve: the pleasure which vanishes vanishes for good, there is no substitute for it. Other pleasures come, which replace nothing. No progress in pleasures, nothing but mutations.
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This endured absence is nothing more or less than forgetfulness. I am, intermittently, unfaithful. This is the condition of my survival.
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The book creates meaning, the meaning creates life.
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Who speaks is not who writes, and who writes is not who is.
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Each of us has his own rhythm of suffering.
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Great portrait photographers are great mythologists.
ROLAND BARTHES