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.
ROLAND BARTHESThis endured absence is nothing more or less than forgetfulness. I am, intermittently, unfaithful. This is the condition of my survival.
More Roland Barthes Quotes
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Where you are tender, you speak your plural.
ROLAND BARTHES -
All official institutions of language are repeating machines: school, sports, advertising, popular songs, news, all continually repeat the same structure, the same meaning, often the same words: the stereotype is a political fact, the major figure of ideology.
ROLAND BARTHES -
It must always be considered as though spoken by a character in a novel
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Great portrait photographers are great mythologists.
ROLAND BARTHES -
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?
ROLAND BARTHES -
I love you is unsubtle. It removes explanations, facilities, degrees, scruples.
ROLAND BARTHES -
I try to busy myself elsewhere, to arrive late; but I always lose at this game. Whatever I do, I find myself there, with nothing to do, punctual, even ahead of time.
ROLAND BARTHES -
Painting can feign reality without having seen it.
ROLAND BARTHES -
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.
ROLAND BARTHES -
Every exploration is an appropriation.
ROLAND BARTHES -
Myth is neither a lie nor a confession: it is an inflexion.
ROLAND BARTHES -
Don’t say mourning. It’s too psychoanalytic. I’m not mourning. I’m suffering.
ROLAND BARTHES -
We don’t forget, but something vacant settles in us.
ROLAND BARTHES -
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 -
If I acknowledge my dependency, I do so because for me it is a means of signifying my demand: in the realm of love, futility is not a “weakness” or an “absurdity”: it is a strong sign: the more futile, the more it signifies and the more it asserts itself as strength.)
ROLAND BARTHES -
Is not the most erotic part of the body wherever the clothing affords a glimpse?
ROLAND BARTHES -
Those who fail to reread are obliged to read the same story everywhere.
ROLAND BARTHES -
The photographic image is a message without a code.
ROLAND BARTHES -
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.
ROLAND BARTHES -
The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.
ROLAND BARTHES -
The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.
ROLAND BARTHES -
Physically, the Ventoux is dreadful. Bald, it’s the spirit of Dry: Its climate (it is much more an essence of climate than a geographic place) makes it a damned terrain, a testing place for heroes, something like a higher hell.
ROLAND BARTHES -
Wine is a part of society because it provides a basis not only for a morality but also for an environment; it is an ornament in the slightest ceremonials of French daily life, from the snack to the feast, from the conversation at the local cafT to the speech at a formal dinner.
ROLAND BARTHES -
Today there is no symbolic compensation for old age, no recognition of a specific value: wisdom, perceptiveness, experience, vision.
ROLAND BARTHES -
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?
ROLAND BARTHES -
Every photograph is a certificate of presence.
ROLAND BARTHES