Roland Barthes Quotes - Page 2

Quotes about:

• Painting can feign reality without having seen it.

  Roland Barthes

  Reality, Painting

  17 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

  32 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

  51 Copy quote

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

  Roland Barthes

  Photography, Invisible, Photograph

  16 Copy quote

• Is the scene always visual? It can be aural, the frame can be linguistic: I can fall in love with a sentence spoken to me: and not only because it says something which manages to touch my desire, but because of its syntactical turn (framing), which will inhabit me like a memory.

  Roland Barthes

  Falling In Love, Memories, Desire

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

  7 Copy quote

• What love lays bare in me is energy.

  Roland Barthes

  Energy, Lays

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

  19 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

  35 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

  45 Copy quote

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

  Roland Barthes

  Hero, Vision, Makers

  14 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

  15 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

  20 Copy quote

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

  Roland Barthes

  Mourning, Suffering, Psychoanalytic

  22 Copy quote

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

  Roland Barthes

  Stories, Failing, Obliged

  9 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

  22 Copy quote

• The Text is not a definitive object.

  Roland Barthes

  Objects

  "From Work to Text". Book by Roland Barthes. Proposition 1, 1971.

  6 Copy quote

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

  Roland Barthes

  Fashion, Novelty, Values

  27 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

  23 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

  12 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

  54 Copy quote

• Death of the Father would deprive literature of many of its pleasures. If there is no longer a Father, why tell stories? Doesn't every narrative lead back to Oedipus? Isn't storytelling always a way of searching for one's origin, speaking one's conflicts with the Law, entering into the dialectic of tenderness and hatred?

  Roland Barthes

  Father, Oedipus, Law

  Roland Barthes (2012). “How to Live Together: Novelistic Simulations of Some Everyday Spaces”, p.190, Columbia University Press

  8 Copy quote

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

  Roland Barthes

  Book

  20 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

  42 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

  23 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

  22 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

  18 Copy quote

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