In 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.
ROLAND BARTHESThus every writer’s motto reads: mad I cannot be, sane I do not deign to be, neurotic I am.
More Roland Barthes Quotes
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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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I call the discourse of power any discourse that engenders blame, hence guilt, in its recipient.
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He who reads a story only once is condemned to read the same story his whole life.
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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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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.)
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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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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 haiku reproduces the designating gesture of the child pointing at whatever it is (the haiku shows no partiality for the subject), merely saying: that!
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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.
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Through the mythology of Einstein, the world blissfully regained the image of knowledge reduced to a formula.
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We know that the war against intelligence is always waged in the name of common sense.
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The best principals are not heroes; they are hero makers.
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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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To make someone wait: the constant prerogative of all power.
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Language is never innocent.
ROLAND BARTHES