Today there is no symbolic compensation for old age, no recognition of a specific value: wisdom, perceptiveness, experience, vision.
ROLAND BARTHESNew 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.
More Roland Barthes Quotes
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I love you is unsubtle. It removes explanations, facilities, degrees, scruples.
ROLAND BARTHES -
Language is never innocent.
ROLAND BARTHES -
Why is it better to last than to burn?
ROLAND BARTHES -
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.
ROLAND BARTHES -
I am interested in language because it wounds or seduces me.
ROLAND BARTHES -
How does meaning get into the image? Where does it end? And if it ends, what is there beyond?
ROLAND BARTHES -
Those who fail to reread are obliged to read the same story everywhere.
ROLAND BARTHES -
We know that the war against intelligence is always waged in the name of common sense.
ROLAND BARTHES -
Painting can feign reality without having seen it.
ROLAND BARTHES -
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 BARTHES -
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 BARTHES -
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.
ROLAND BARTHES -
There are people who think that wrestling is an ignoble sport. Wrestling is not sport, it is a spectacle, and it is no more ignoble to attend a wrestled performance of suffering than a performance of the sorrows of Arnolphe or Andromaque.
ROLAND BARTHES -
Literature is the question minus the answer.
ROLAND BARTHES