The new is not a fashion, it is a value.
ROLAND BARTHESIn an initial period, Photography, in order to surprise, photographs the notable; but soon, by a familiar reversal, it decrees notable whatever it photographs. The ‘anything whatever’ then becomes the sophisticated acme of value.
More Roland Barthes Quotes
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There is only one way left to escape the alienation of present day society: to retreat ahead of it.
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To eat, to speak, to sing (need we add: to kiss?) are operations which have the same site of the body for origin.
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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?
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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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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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The photographic image is a message without a code.
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To eat steak rare represents both a nature and a morality.
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The author enters into his own death, writing begins.
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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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New York is a city of geometric heights, a petrified desert of grids and lattices, an inferno of greenish abstraction under a flat sky, a real Metropolis from which man is absent by his very accumulation.
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How does meaning get into the image? Where does it end? And if it ends, what is there beyond?
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The Ventoux is a god of Evil, to which sacrifices must be made. It never forgives weakness and extracts an unfair tribute of suffering.
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Thus every writer’s motto reads: mad I cannot be, sane I do not deign to be, neurotic I am.
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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.
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I love you is unsubtle. It removes explanations, facilities, degrees, scruples.
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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.
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A paradox: the same century invented history and photography. But history is a memory fabricated according to positive formulas, a pure intellectual discourse which abolishes mythic time; and the photograph is a certain but fugitive testimony.
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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.
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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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The lover who does not forget sometimes dies from excess, fatigue, and the strain of memory (like Werther).
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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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I encounter millions of bodies in my life; of these millions, I may desire some hundreds; but of these hundreds, I love only one.
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What love lays bare in me is energy.
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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.
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Every photograph is a certificate of presence.
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Is not the most erotic part of the body wherever the clothing affords a glimpse?
ROLAND BARTHES