ROLAND BARTHES QUOTES II

French philosopher & literary theorist (1915-1980)

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

ROLAND BARTHES

Mourning Diary


Myth deprives the object of which it speaks of all history. In it, history evaporates.

ROLAND BARTHES

Mythologies


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

A Lover's Discourse: Fragments


The world increases my sadness, my dryness, my confusion, my irritation.

ROLAND BARTHES

Mourning Diary


We don't forget, but something vacant settles in us.

ROLAND BARTHES

Mourning Diary


Myth is depoliticized speech.

ROLAND BARTHES

Mythologies


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

"Sentence", The Pleasure of the Text


I pass lightly through the reactionary darkness.

ROLAND BARTHES

The Pleasure of the Text


The pleasure which vanishes vanishes for good, there is no substitute for it. Other pleasures come, which replace nothing. No progress in pleasures, nothing but mutations.

ROLAND BARTHES

Roland Barthes


Each of us has his own rhythm of suffering.

ROLAND BARTHES

Mourning Diary


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

Mythologies


The bastard form of mass culture is humiliated repetition: content, ideological schema, the blurring of contradictions--these are repeated, but the superficial forms are varied: always new books, new programs, new films, news items, but always the same meaning.

ROLAND BARTHES

"Modern", The Pleasure of the Text


The Text is not a co-existence of meanings but a passage, an overcrossing; thus it answers not to an interpretation, even a liberal one, but to an explosion, a dissemination.

ROLAND BARTHES

From Work to Text


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

ROLAND BARTHES

Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography


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

Mythologies

Tags: cars


The book creates meaning, the meaning creates life.

ROLAND BARTHES

The Pleasures of the Text


The bourgeoisie is defined as the social class which does not want to be named.

ROLAND BARTHES

Mythologies


Which is what literature is: that I cannot read without pain, without choking on truth.

ROLAND BARTHES

Mourning Diary