Roland Barthes Quotes - Page 3

Quotes about:

• 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.

  Roland Barthes

  Photography, Order, Notable

  10 Copy quote

• ...what I enjoy in a narrative is not directly its content or even its structure, but rather the abrasions I impose upon the fine surface: I read on, I skip, I look up, I dip in again. Which has nothing to do with the deep laceration the text of bliss inflicts upon language itself, and not upon the simple temporality of its reading.

  Roland Barthes

  Reading, Simple, Looks

  19 Copy quote

• What the Photograph reproduces to infinity has occurred only once: the Photograph mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentially.

  Roland Barthes

  Photography, Infinity, Photograph

  25 Copy quote

• But I never looked like that!’ - How do you know? What is the ‘you’ you might or might not look like? Where do you find it - by which morphological or expressive calibration? Where is your authentic body? You are the only one who can never see yourself except as an image; you never see your eyes unless they are dulled by the gaze they rest upon the mirror or the lens (I am interested in seeing my eyes only when they look at you): even and especially for your own body, you are condemned to the repertoire of its images.

  Roland Barthes

  Eye, Mirrors, Lenses

  Roland Barthes (1994). “Roland Barthes”

  15 Copy quote

• It is no longer the sexual which is indecent, it is the sentimental.

  Roland Barthes

  Sentimental

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

  10 Copy quote

• …the book creates meaning, the meaning creates life.

  Roland Barthes

  Book

  19 Copy quote

• To eat steak rare . . . represents both a nature and a morality.

  Roland Barthes

  Pregnancy, Morality, Steak

  14 Copy quote

• Architecture is always dream and function, expression of a utopia and instrument of a convenience.

  Roland Barthes

  Dream, Expression, Architecture

  Roland Barthes (1997). “The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies”, p.6, Univ of California Press

  7 Copy quote

• 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.

  Roland Barthes

  Cameras, Sound, Woods

  10 Copy quote

• Is not the most erotic part of the body wherever the clothing affords a glimpse?

  Roland Barthes

  Erotic, Glimpse, Body

  1973 Le Plaisir du texte.

  18 Copy quote

• 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.

  Roland Barthes

  Fashion, Past, Oppression

  Roland Barthes (1983). “Systeme de la Mode”, p.112, Univ of California Press

  21 Copy quote

• 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).

  Roland Barthes

  Writing, Desire, Language

  10 Copy quote

• I make the other’s absence responsible for my worldliness.

  Roland Barthes

  Absence, Responsible, Worldliness

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

  11 Copy quote

• A picture is never anything but its own plural description.

  Roland Barthes

  Description

  7 Copy quote

• Whereas the work is understood to be traceable to a source (through a process of derivation or "filiation"), the Text is without a source - the "author" a mere "guest" at the reading of the Text.

  Roland Barthes

  Reading, Guests, Source

  "From Work to Text". Book by Roland Barthes. Proposition 5, 1971.

  10 Copy quote

• Those who fail to reread are obliged to read the same story everywhere.

  Roland Barthes

  Stories, Failing, Obliged

  8 Copy quote

• Henceforth I would have to cosent to combine two voices: the voice of banality (to say what everyone sees and knows) and the voice of singularity (to replenish such banality with all the élan of an emotion which belonged only to myself).

  Roland Barthes

  Two, Voice, Emotion

  12 Copy quote

• Language is neither reactionary nor progressive; it is quite simply fascist; for fascism does not prevent speech, it compels speech.

  Roland Barthes

  Doe, Speech, Language

  6 Copy quote

• 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.

  Roland Barthes

  Agents, World, Determined

  10 Copy quote

• 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

  Photography, Memories, Intellectual

  12 Copy quote

• For Death must be somewhere in a society; if it is no longer (or less intensely) in religion, it must be elsewhere; perhaps in this image which produces Death while trying to preserve life. Contemporary with the withdrawal of rites, Photography may correspond to the intrusion, in our modern society, of an asymbolic Death, outside of religion, outside of ritual, a kind of abrupt dive into literal Death.

  Roland Barthes

  Photography, Trying, Withdrawal

  9 Copy quote

• He who reads a story only once is condemned to read the same story his whole life.

  Roland Barthes

  Stories, Whole Life, Whole

  13 Copy quote

• I passed beyond the unreality of the thing represented, I entered crazily into the spectacle, into the image, taking into my arms what is dead, what is going to die.

  Roland Barthes

  Arms, Unreality, Dies

  20 Copy quote

• I want a History of Looking. For the Photograph is the advent of myself as other: a cunning dissociation of consciousness from identity. Even odder: it was before Photography that men had the most to say about the vision of the double. Heautoscopy was compared with an hallucinosis; for centuries this was a great mythic theme.

  Roland Barthes

  Photography, Men, Vision

  13 Copy quote

• 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).

  Roland Barthes

  Unique, Desire, Stereotype

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

  18 Copy quote

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