Roland Barthes Quotes - Page 6

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• It is said that mourning, by its gradual labour, slowly erases pain; I could not, I cannot believe this; because for me, Time eliminates the emotion of loss (I do note weep), that is all. For the rest, everything has remained motionless. For what I have lost is not a Figure (the Mother), but a being; and not a being, but a quality (a soul): not the indispensable, but the irreplaceable.

  Roland Barthes

  Mother, Pain, Believe

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• I have not a desire but a need for solitude.

  Roland Barthes

  Solitude, Desire, Needs

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• The Winter Photograph was my Ariadne, not because it would help me discover a secret thing (monster or treasure), but because it would tell me what constituted that thread which drew me toward Photography. I had understood that henceforth I must interrogate the evidence of Photography, not from the viewpoint of pleasure, but in relation to what we romantically call love and death.

  Roland Barthes

  Photography, Winter, Secret

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• I think that cars today are almost the exact equivalent of the great Gothic cathedrals: I mean the supreme creation of an era, conceived with passion by unknown artists, and consumed in image if not in usage by a whole population which appropriates them as a purely magical object.

  Roland Barthes

  Passion, Mean, Thinking

  Mythologies "La Nouvelle Citroen" (1957) (translation by Annette Lavers)

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• The Photograph belongs to that class of laminated objects whose two leaves cannot be separated without destroying them both: the windowpane and the landscape, and why not: Good and Evil, desire and its object: dualities we can conceive but not perceive... Whatever it grants to vision and whatever its manner, a photograph is always invisible: it is not it that we see.

  Roland Barthes

  Photography, Class, Two

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• The politician being interviewed clearly takes a great deal of trouble to imagine an ending to his sentence: and if he stopped short? His entire policy would be jeopardized!

  Roland Barthes

  Would Be, Interviews, Trouble

  "The Pleasure of the Text (Sentence)". Book by Roland Barthes, 1973.

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• Today there is no symbolic compensation for old age, no recognition of a specific value: wisdom, perceptiveness, experience, vision.

  Roland Barthes

  Vision, Age, Today

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• In 1850, August Salzmann photographed, near Jerusalem, the road to Beith-Lehem (as it was spelled at the time): nothing but stony ground, olive trees; but three tenses dizzy my consciousness: my present, the time of Jesus, and that of the photographer, all this under the instance of 'reality' - and no longer through the elaborations of the text, whether fictional or poetic, which itself is never credible down to the root.

  Roland Barthes

  Jesus, Reality, August

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• Eiffel saw his Tower in the form of a serious object, rational, useful; men return it to him in the form of a great baroque dream which quite naturally touches on the borders of the irrational ... architecture is always dream and function, expression of a utopia and instrument of a convenience.

  Roland Barthes

  Dream, Men, Expression

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

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• It must always be considered as though spoken by a character in a novel

  Roland Barthes

  Character, Novel

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• Each photograph is read as the private appearance of its referent: the age of Photography corresponds precisely to the explosion of the private into the public, or rather into the creation of a new social value, which is the publicity of the private: the private is consumes as such, publicly.

  Roland Barthes

  Photography, Social Values, Age

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• The gesture of the amorous embrace seems to fulfill, for a time, the subject's dream of total union with the loved being: The longing for consummation with the other.

  Roland Barthes

  Dream, Unions, Gestures

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• The necessary condition for an image is sight.

  Roland Barthes

  Sight, Conditions

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• Historically and politically, the petit-bourgeois is the key to the century. The bourgeois and proletariat classes have become abstractions: the petite-bourgeoisie, in contrast, is everywhere, you can see it everywhere, even in the areas of the bourgeois and the proletariat, what's left of them.

  Roland Barthes

  Keys, Class, Bourgeoisie

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• It is as if the Photograph always carries its referent with itself, both affected by the same amorous or funereal immobility, at the very heart of the moving world: they are glued together, limb by limb, like the condemned man and the corpse in certain tortures; or even like those pairs of fish (sharks, I think, according to Michelet) which navigate in convoy, as though united by an eternal coitus.

  Roland Barthes

  Moving, Heart, Men

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• Le langage est une peau: je frotte mon langage contre l'autre. Language is a skin; I rub my language against another language.

  Roland Barthes

  Skins, Language

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• Tout refus du langage est une mort. Any refusal of language is a death.

  Roland Barthes

  Language, Refusal

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• The skyscraper establishes the block, the block creates the street, the street offers itself to man.

  Roland Barthes

  Block, Men, Skyscraper

  Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag (1983). “Barthes: Selected Writings”

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• Fashion postulates an achrony, a time which does not exist; here the past is shameful and the present is constantly "eaten up" by the Fashion being heralded.

  Roland Barthes

  Fashion, Past, Doe

  Roland Barthes (1983). “Systeme de la Mode”, p.128, Univ of California Press

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• Flaubert had infinite correction to perform.

  Roland Barthes

  Infinite, Corrections

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• The petit-bourgeois is a man unable to imagine the Other. If he comes face to face with him, he blinds himself, ignores and denies him, or else transforms him into himself.

  Roland Barthes

  Men, Faces, Imagine

  Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag (1983). “Barthes: Selected Writings”

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• As a language, Garbo's singularity was of the order of the concept, that of Audrey Hepburn is of the order of the substance; the face of Garbo is an Idea, that of Hepburn, an Event.

  Roland Barthes

  Order, Ideas, Events

  Roland Barthes (1973). “Mythologies”

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• For the theatre one needs long arms; it is better to have them too long than too short. An artiste with short arms can never, never make a fine gesture.

  Roland Barthes

  Long, Theatre, Needs

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• When we define the Photograph as a motionless image, this does not mean only that the figures it represents do not move; it means that they do not (i)emerge(i), do not (i)leave(i): they are anesthetized and fastened down, like butterflies.

  Roland Barthes

  Moving, Butterfly, Mean

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• Usually the amateur is defined as an immature state of the artist: someone who cannot — or will not — achieve the mastery of a profession. But in the field of photographic practice, it is the amateur, on the contrary, who is the assumption of the professional: for it is he who stands closer to the (i)noeme(i) of Photography.

  Roland Barthes

  Photography, Artist, Practice

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