Roland Barthes Quotes - Page 6

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• There are people who think that wrestling is an ignoble sport. Wrestling is not sport, it is a spectacle, and it is no more ignoble to attend a wrestled performance of suffering than a performance of the sorrows of Arnolphe or Andromaque.

  Roland Barthes

  Sports, Wrestling, Thinking

  Roland Barthes (1973). “Mythologies”

  9 Copy quote

• Literature is like phosphorus: it shines with its maximum brilliance and the moment when it attempts to die.

  Roland Barthes

  Shining, Literature, Moments

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

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• If I acknowledge my dependency, I do so because for me it is a means of signifying my demand: in the realm of love, futility is not a "weakness" or an "absurdity": it is a strong sign: the more futile, the more it signifies and the more it asserts itself as strength.)

  Roland Barthes

  Strong, Mean, Weakness

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

  7 Copy quote

• 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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• Physically, the Ventoux is dreadful. Bald, it's the spirit of Dry: Its climate (it is much more an essence of climate than a geographic place) makes it a damned terrain, a testing place for heroes, something like a higher hell.

  Roland Barthes

  Hero, Essence, Climate

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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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• Television doomed us to the Family, whose household instrument it has become-what the hearth used to be, flanked by the communal kettle.

  Roland Barthes

  Heart, Television, Used

  Roland Barthes, Richard Howard (1989). “Bruissement de la Langue”, p.346, Univ of California Press

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

  Roland Barthes

  Character, Novel

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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 necessary condition for an image is sight.

  Roland Barthes

  Sight, Conditions

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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”

  50 Copy quote

• 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”

  5 Copy quote

• To dope the racer is as criminal, as sacrilegious, as trying to imitate God; it is stealing from God the privilege of the spark.

  Roland Barthes

  Sports, Dope, Trying

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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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• Even hidden in the most squalid Parisian halls, wrestling partakes of the nature of the great solar spectacles, Greek drama and bullfights: in both, a light without shadow generates an emotion without reserve.

  Roland Barthes

  Drama, Wrestling, Light

  Roland Barthes (1973). “Mythologies”

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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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• The unary Photograph has every reason to be banal, 'unity'
  of composition being the first rule of vulgar (and notably, of academic) rhetoric: 'The subject,' says one handbook for amateur photographers, 'must be simple, free of useless accessories; this is called the Search for Unity.

  Roland Barthes

  Simple, Unity, Accessories

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• Rarely do outside of school remedies work their way into the fabric of the schools or into the teachers lives, and more rarely into the classrooms. Therefore they only offer a modest hope of influencing the basic culture of the school

  Roland Barthes

  Teacher, School, Culture

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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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