Roland Barthes Quotes - Page 4

Quotes about:

• 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

• 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

  8 Copy quote

• The realists do not take the photograph for a 'copy' of reality, but for an emanation of past reality, a magic, not an art.

  Roland Barthes

  Photography, Art, Past

  6 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

• 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

• 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

• All of a sudden it didn't bother me not being modern.

  Roland Barthes

  Modern, Bother

  8 Copy quote

• I call the discourse of power any discourse that engenders blame, hence guilt, in its recipient.

  Roland Barthes

  Power, Guilt, Blame

  7 Copy quote

• Contemporary poetry ... tries to transform the sign back into meaning:
  its ideal, ultimately, would be to reach not the meaning of words, but the
  meaning of things themselves. This is why it clouds the language, increases
  as much as it can the abstractness of the concept and the arbitrariness
  of the sign and stretches to the limit the link between signifier and signified.

  Roland Barthes

  Clouds, Trying, Would Be

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

  18 Copy quote

• 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!

  Roland Barthes

  Children, Gestures, Shows

  9 Copy quote

• For the photograph's immobility is somehow the result of a perverse confusion between two concepts: the Real and the Live: by attesting that the object has been real, the photograph surreptitiously induces belief that it is alive, because of that delusion which makes us attribute to Reality an absolute superior, somehow eternal value; but by shifting this reality to the past ("this-has-been"), the photograph suggests that it is already dead.

  Roland Barthes

  Real, Past, Two

  "Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography". Essay by Roland Barthes (translated by R. Howard), 1980.

  16 Copy quote

• To eat, to speak, to sing (need we add: to kiss?) are operations which have the same site of the body for origin.

  Roland Barthes

  Kissing, Add, Needs

  12 Copy quote

• To know that one does not write for the other, to know that these things I am going to write will never cause me to be loved by the one I love (the other), to know that writing compensates for nothing, sublimates nothing, that it is precisely there where you are not--this is the beginning of writing.

  Roland Barthes

  Writing, Doe, Causes

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

  12 Copy quote

• One day, quite some time ago, I happened on a photograph of Napoleon’s youngest brother, Jerome, taken in 1852. And I realized then, with an amazement I have not been able to lessen since: ‘I am looking at eyes that looked at the Emperor.’ Sometimes I would mention this amazement, but since no one seemed to share it, nor even to understand it (life consists of these little touches of solitude), I forgot about it.

  Roland Barthes

  Brother, Taken, Eye

  6 Copy quote

• There are two kinds of liberalism. A liberalism which is always, subterraneously authoritative and paternalistic, on the side of one's good conscience. And then there is a liberalism which is more ethical than political; one would have to find another name for this. Something like a profound suspension of judgment.

  Roland Barthes

  Names, Two, Profound

  9 Copy quote

• 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.

  Roland Barthes

  Writing, Voice, Destruction

  "Bruissement de la Langue".

  13 Copy quote

• 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...?

  Roland Barthes

  Mean, Doe, Answers

  15 Copy quote

• Wine is a part of society because it provides a basis not only for a morality but also for an environment; it is an ornament in the slightest ceremonials of French daily life, from the snack to the feast, from the conversation at the local cafT to the speech at a formal dinner.

  Roland Barthes

  Wine, Snacks, Ornaments

  Roland Barthes (1973). “Mythologies”

  7 Copy quote

• 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.

  8 Copy quote

• When we look at a photograph of ourselves or of others, we are really looking at the return of the dead.

  Roland Barthes

  Looks, Return, Photograph

  4 Copy quote

• Tout ce qui est anachronique est obsce' ne. Everything anachronistic is obscene.

  Roland Barthes

  Obscene

  5 Copy quote

• The lover's fatal identity is precisely this: I am the one who waits.

  Roland Barthes

  Waiting, Identity, Lovers

  7 Copy quote

• What I claim is to live to the full the contradiction of my time, which may well make sarcasm the condition of truth.

  Roland Barthes

  Sarcastic, Time, Truth

  Roland Barthes (1973). “Mythologies”

  12 Copy quote

• Why is it better to last than to burn?

  Roland Barthes

  Lasts

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

  9 Copy quote

• This endured absence is nothing more or less than forgetfulness. I am, intermittently, unfaithful. This is the condition of my survival.

  Roland Barthes

  Survival, Unfaithful, Absence

  7 Copy quote

Page 4 of 7

First

← Prev

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

Next →

• facebook
• twitter
• googleplus
• email
• linkedin