Roland Barthes Quotes - Page 2

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• I am interested in language because it wounds or seduces me.

  Roland Barthes

  Language, Seducing, Wounds

  60 Copy quote

• A photograph is always invisible, it is not it that we see.

  Roland Barthes

  Photography, Invisible, Photograph

  15 Copy quote

• One of the marks of our world is perhaps this reversal: we live according to a generalized image-repertoire. Consider the United Sates, where everything is transformed into images: only images exist and are produced and are consumes ... Such a reversal necessarily raises the ethical question: not that the image is immoral, irreligious, or diabolic (as some have declared it, upon the advent of the Photograph), but because, when generalized, it completely de-realizes the human world of conflicts and desires, under cover of illustrating it.

  Roland Barthes

  Ethical Questions, Our World, Desire

  13 Copy quote

• The photographer, like an acrobat, must defy the laws of probability or even of possibility; at the limit, he must defy those of the interesting: the photograph becomes surprising when we do not know why it has been taken.

  Roland Barthes

  Taken, Law, Interesting

  21 Copy quote

• To hide a passion totally (or even to hide, more simply, its excess) is inconceivable: not because the human subject is too weak, but because passion is in essence made to be seen: the hiding must be seen: I want you to know that I am hiding something from you, that is the active paradox I must resolve: at one and the same time it must be known and not known: I want you to know that I don't want to show my feelings: that is the message I address to the other.

  Roland Barthes

  Passion, Hiding Something, Essence

  50 Copy quote

• In front of the photograph of my mother as a child, I tell myself: she is going to die: I shudder, like winnicott's psychotic patient, over a catastrophe which has already occurred. Whether or not the subject is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe.

  Roland Barthes

  Mother, Children, Patient

  43 Copy quote

• Painting can feign reality without having seen it.

  Roland Barthes

  Reality, Painting

  16 Copy quote

• 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.

  Roland Barthes

  Two, Desire, Burning

  31 Copy quote

• The new is not a fashion, it is a value.

  Roland Barthes

  Fashion, Novelty, Values

  26 Copy quote

• What love lays bare in me is energy.

  Roland Barthes

  Energy, Lays

  Roland Barthes (1990). “A lover's discourse: fragments”, Penguin Books

  18 Copy quote

• The best principals are not heroes; they are hero makers.

  Roland Barthes

  Hero, Vision, Makers

  13 Copy quote

• As a jealous man, I suffer four times over: because I am jealous, because I blame myself for being so, because I fear that my jealousy will wound the other, because I allow myself to be subject to a banality: I suffer from being excluded, from being aggressive, from being crazy, and from being common.

  Roland Barthes

  Crazy, Jealous, Men

  34 Copy quote

• I love you is unsubtle. It removes explanations, facilities, degrees, scruples.

  Roland Barthes

  Love You, Degrees, Scruples

  8 Copy quote

• The Photograph is an extended, loaded evidence — as if it caricatured not the figure of what it represents (quite the converse) but its very existence ... The Photograph then becomes a bizarre (i)medium(i), a new form of hallucination: false on the level of perception, true on the level of time: a temporal hallucination, so to speak, a modest (o)shared(i) hallucination (on the one hand 'it is not there,' on the other 'but it has indeed been'): a mad image, chafed by reality.

  Roland Barthes

  Reality, Hands, Mad

  11 Copy quote

• 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.

  Roland Barthes

  Love, Writing, Hysteria

  Roland Barthes (1990). “A lover's discourse: fragments”, Penguin Books

  53 Copy quote

• There is only one way left to escape the alienation of present day society: to retreat ahead of it.

  Roland Barthes

  Society, Way, Retreat

  "Political Culture and Public Opinion". Book by Roland Barthes, p.175, January 1, 1989.

  19 Copy quote

• 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

  Love Is, Lasts, Kind

  Roland Barthes (1990). “A lover's discourse: fragments”, Penguin Books

  22 Copy quote

• 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.

  Roland Barthes

  People, Understanding, Kind

  41 Copy quote

• Ultimately, Photography is subversive, not when it frightens, repels, or even stigmatizes, but when it is pensive, when it thinks.

  Roland Barthes

  Photography, Thinking, Pensive

  11 Copy quote

• Don't say mourning. It's too psychoanalytic. I'm not mourning. I'm suffering.

  Roland Barthes

  Mourning, Suffering, Psychoanalytic

  20 Copy quote

• All official institutions of language are repeating machines: school, sports, advertising, popular songs, news, all continually repeat the same structure, the same meaning, often the same words: the stereotype is a political fact, the major figure of ideology.

  Roland Barthes

  Sports, Song, School

  21 Copy quote

• Ultimately — or at the limit — in order to see a photograph well, it is best to look away or close your eyes. 'The necessary condition for an image is sight,'Janouch told Kafka; and Kafka smiled and replied: 'We photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds. My stories are a way of shutting my eyes.

  Roland Barthes

  Photography, Eye, Sight

  16 Copy quote

• I am simultaneously and contradictorily both happy and unhappy: 'to succeed' or 'to fail' have for me only ephemeral, contingent meanings (this does not stop my desires and sorrows from being violent ones); what impels me, secretly and obstinately, is not tactical: I accept and I affirm, irrespective of the true and the false, of success and failure; I am withdrawn from all finality, I live according to chance.

  Roland Barthes

  Sorrow, Unhappy, Desire

  11 Copy quote

• I want to be both pathetic and admirable, I want to be at the same time a child and an adult. Thereby I gamble, I take a risk: for it is always possible that the other will simply ask no question whatever about these unaccustomed glasses; that the other will see, in the fact, no sign.

  Roland Barthes

  Children, Glasses, Risk

  Roland Barthes (1990). “A lover's discourse: fragments”, Penguin Books

  22 Copy quote

• I encounter millions of bodies in my life; of these millions, I may desire some hundreds; but of these hundreds, I love only one.

  Roland Barthes

  Desire, Encounters, Body

  Roland Barthes (1990). “A lover's discourse: fragments”, Penguin Books

  19 Copy quote

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