Quote

Henceforth I would have to cosent to combine two voices: the voice of banality (to say what everyone sees and knows) and the voice of singularity (to replenish such banality with all the élan of an emotion which belonged only to myself).

Roland Barthes

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Roland Barthes
Age: 64 †
Born: 1915
Born: November 12
Died: 1980
Died: March 25
Diarist
Essayist
Linguist
Literary Critic
Literary Scholar
Literary Theorist
Mythographer
Non-Fiction Writer
Philosopher
Screenwriter
Roland Gérard Barthes
Voice
Henceforth
Everyone
Banality
Two
Singularity
Would
Belonged
Combine
Voices
Sees
Emotion
Replenish

More quotes by Roland Barthes

Image
Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.
Roland Barthes
Image
Those who fail to reread are obliged to read the same story everywhere.
Roland Barthes
Image
The art of living has no history: it does not evolve: 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
Image
L'amoureux qui n'oublie pas quelquefois meurt par exce' s, fatigue et tension de me moire (tel Werther). The lover who does not forget sometimes dies from excess, fatigue, and the strain of memory (like Werther).
Roland Barthes
Image
Today there is no symbolic compensation for old age, no recognition of a specific value: wisdom, perceptiveness, experience, vision.
Roland Barthes
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Through the mythology of Einstein, the world blissfully regained the image of knowledge reduced to a formula.
Roland Barthes
Image
This endured absence is nothing more or less than forgetfulness. I am, intermittently, unfaithful. This is the condition of my survival.
Roland Barthes
Image
Cameras, in short, were clocks for seeing, and perhaps in me someone very old still hears in the photographic mechanism the living sound of the wood.
Roland Barthes
Image
A light without shadow generates an emotion without reserve.
Roland Barthes
Image
Literature is the question minus the answer.
Roland Barthes
Image
The Text is not a definitive object.
Roland Barthes
Image
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
Image
To make someone wait: the constant prerogative of all power.
Roland Barthes
Image
One must turn the tongue seven times in the mouth before speaking.
Roland Barthes
Image
When we look at a photograph of ourselves or of others, we are really looking at the return of the dead.
Roland Barthes
Image
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
Image
For me the noise of Time is not sad: I love bells, clocks, watches — and I recall that at first photographic implements were related to techniques of cabinetmaking and the machinery of precision: cameras, in short, were clocks for seeing, and perhaps in me someone very old still hears in the photographic mechanism the living sound of the wood.
Roland Barthes
Image
All of a sudden it didn't bother me not being modern.
Roland Barthes