The best principals are not heroes; they are hero makers.
ROLAND BARTHESIt must always be considered as though spoken by a character in a novel
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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A photograph is always invisible, it is not it that we see.
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The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.
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I am interested in language because it wounds or seduces me.
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Isn’t desire always the same, whether the object is present or absent? Isn’t the object always absent? -This isn’t the same languor: there are two words: Pothos, desire for the absent being, and Himéros, the more burning desire for the present being.
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It is no longer the sexual which is indecent, it is the sentimental.
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The text you write must prove to me that it desires me. This proof exists: it is writing. Writing is: the science of the various blisses of language, its Kama Sutra (this science has but one treatise: writing itself).
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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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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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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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The lover who does not forget sometimes dies from excess, fatigue, and the strain of memory (like Werther).
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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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Frontiers are physical as well as symbolic constructions.
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Who speaks is not who writes, and who writes is not who is.
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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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As Spectator I wanted to explore photography not as a question (a theme) but as a wound.
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We can never know, for the good reason that writing is the destruction of every voice, every origin. Writing is that neuter, that composite, that obliquity into which our subject flees, the black-and-white where all identity is lost, beginning with the very identity of the body that writes.
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Every photograph is a certificate of presence.
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Don’t say mourning. It’s too psychoanalytic. I’m not mourning. I’m 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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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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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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Great portrait photographers are great mythologists.
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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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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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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