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.
ROLAND BARTHESLiterature 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.
More Roland Barthes Quotes
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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.
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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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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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One must turn the tongue seven times in the mouth before speaking.
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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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The lover who does not forget sometimes dies from excess, fatigue, and the strain of memory (like Werther).
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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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What the Photograph reproduces to infinity has occurred only once: the Photograph mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentially.
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Where you are tender, you speak your plural.
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Painting can feign reality without having seen it.
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Myth is neither a lie nor a confession: it is an inflexion.
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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.
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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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Touch is the most demystifying of all senses, different from sight which is the most magical.
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Don’t say mourning. It’s too psychoanalytic. I’m not mourning. I’m suffering.
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Every object in the world can pass from a closed, silent existence to an oral state, open to appropriation by society, for there is no law, whether natural or not, which forbids talking about things
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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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How does meaning get into the image? Where does it end? And if it ends, what is there beyond?
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The author enters into his own death, writing begins.
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It must always be considered as though spoken by a character in a novel
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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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It is no longer the sexual which is indecent, it is the sentimental.
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I make the other’s absence responsible for my worldliness.
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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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Great portrait photographers are great mythologists.
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The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.
ROLAND BARTHES