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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

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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
Convenience
Serious
Rational
Towers
Quite
Object
Irrational
Dream
Instruments
Eiffel
Form
Function
Instrument
Baroque
Great
Saws
Borders
Tower
Always
Objects
Naturally
Utopia
Men
Return
Useful
Touches
Expression
Architecture

More quotes by Roland Barthes

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Ultimately, Photography is subversive, not when it frightens, repels, or even stigmatizes, but when it is pensive, when it thinks.
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All of a sudden it didn't bother me not being modern.
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The Text is not a definitive object.
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The author enters into his own death, writing begins.
Roland Barthes
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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!
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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.
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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.
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To eat steak rare . . . represents both a nature and a morality.
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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.
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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.
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What love lays bare in me is energy.
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I have not a desire but a need for solitude.
Roland Barthes
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Literature is like phosphorus: it shines with its maximum brilliance and the moment when it attempts to die.
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Tout ce qui est anachronique est obsce' ne. Everything anachronistic is obscene.
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Every new Fashion is a refusal to inherit, a subversion against the oppression of the preceding Fashion Fashion experiences itself as a Right, the natural right of the present over the past.
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Those who fail to reread are obliged to read the same story everywhere.
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It must always be considered as though spoken by a character in a novel
Roland Barthes
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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.
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...language is never innocent.
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To dope the racer is as criminal, as sacrilegious, as trying to imitate God it is stealing from God the privilege of the spark.
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