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A light without shadow generates an emotion without reserve.

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
Without
Generates
Reserve
Reserves
Shadow
Emotion
Light

More quotes by Roland Barthes

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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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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
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Literature is without proofs. By which it must be understood that it cannot prove, not only what it says, but even that it is worth the trouble of saying it.
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I passed beyond the unreality of the thing represented, I entered crazily into the spectacle, into the image, taking into my arms what is dead, what is going to die.
Roland Barthes
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Death of the Father would deprive literature of many of its pleasures. If there is no longer a Father, why tell stories? Doesn't every narrative lead back to Oedipus? Isn't storytelling always a way of searching for one's origin, speaking one's conflicts with the Law, entering into the dialectic of tenderness and hatred?
Roland Barthes
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As Spectator I wanted to explore photography not as a question (a theme) but as a wound.
Roland Barthes
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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
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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
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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
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Today there is no symbolic compensation for old age, no recognition of a specific value: wisdom, perceptiveness, experience, vision.
Roland Barthes
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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
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We don't forget, but something vacant settles in us.
Roland Barthes
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Each of us has his own rhythm of suffering.
Roland Barthes
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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
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Where you are tender, you speak your plural.
Roland Barthes
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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
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...language is never innocent.
Roland Barthes
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Myth is neither a lie nor a confession: it is an inflexion.
Roland Barthes
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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
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Language is neither reactionary nor progressive it is quite simply fascist for fascism does not prevent speech, it compels speech.
Roland Barthes