We know that the war against intelligence is always waged in the name of common sense.
ROLAND BARTHESPleasure 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.
More Roland Barthes Quotes
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Architecture is always dream and function, expression of a utopia and instrument of a convenience.
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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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Touch is the most demystifying of all senses, different from sight which is the most magical.
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It must always be considered as though spoken by a character in a novel
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I call the discourse of power any discourse that engenders blame, hence guilt, in its recipient.
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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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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.
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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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I try to busy myself elsewhere, to arrive late; but I always lose at this game. Whatever I do, I find myself there, with nothing to do, punctual, even ahead of time.
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I am interested in language because it wounds or seduces me.
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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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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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Each of us has his own rhythm of suffering.
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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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A picture is never anything but its own plural description.
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Don’t say mourning. It’s too psychoanalytic. I’m not mourning. I’m suffering.
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Those who fail to reread are obliged to read the same story everywhere.
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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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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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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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Myth is neither a lie nor a confession: it is an inflexion.
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The best principals are not heroes; they are hero makers.
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Great portrait photographers are great mythologists.
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Wine is a part of society because it provides a basis not only for a morality but also for an environment; it is an ornament in the slightest ceremonials of French daily life, from the snack to the feast, from the conversation at the local cafT to the speech at a formal dinner.
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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.
ROLAND BARTHES