The best principals are not heroes; they are hero makers.
ROLAND BARTHESA 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.
More Roland Barthes Quotes
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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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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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It must always be considered as though spoken by a character in a novel
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Each of us has his own rhythm of suffering.
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A photograph is always invisible, it is not it that we see.
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The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.
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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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Those who fail to reread are obliged to read the same story everywhere.
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Cameras, in short, were clocks for seeing, and perhaps in me someone very old still hears in the photographic mechanism the living sound of the wood.
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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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To make someone wait: the constant prerogative of all power.
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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.
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I cannot classify the other, for the other is, precisely, Unique, the singular Image which has miraculously come to correspond to the speciality of my desire. The other is the figure of my truth, and cannot be imprisoned in any stereotype (which is the truth of others).
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The photographic image is a message without a code.
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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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I have tried to be as eclectic as I possibly can with my professional life, and so far it’s been pretty fun.
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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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A light without shadow generates an emotion without reserve.
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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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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.
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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 picture is never anything but its own plural description.
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Where you are tender, you speak your plural.
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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