Quote

Pleasure is continually disappointed, reduced, deflated, in favor of strong, noble values: Truth, Death, Progress, Struggle, Joy, etc. Its victorious rival is Desire: we are always being told about Desire, never about Pleasure.

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
Values
Disappointed
Deflated
Desire
Favors
Victorious
Strong
Noble
Rival
Death
Progress
Rivals
Truth
Joy
Reduced
Always
Told
Continually
Never
Struggle
Etc
Pleasure
Favor

More quotes by Roland Barthes

Image
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
Image
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.
Roland Barthes
Image
Those who fail to reread are obliged to read the same story everywhere.
Roland Barthes
Image
The gesture of the amorous embrace seems to fulfill, for a time, the subject's dream of total union with the loved being: The longing for consummation with the other.
Roland Barthes
Image
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
Image
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
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
I want a History of Looking. For the Photograph is the advent of myself as other: a cunning dissociation of consciousness from identity. Even odder: it was before Photography that men had the most to say about the vision of the double. Heautoscopy was compared with an hallucinosis for centuries this was a great mythic theme.
Roland Barthes
Image
I encounter millions of bodies in my life of these millions, I may desire some hundreds but of these hundreds, I love only one.
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
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
Image
It is no longer the sexual which is indecent, it is the sentimental.
Roland Barthes
Image
All those young photographers who are at work in the world, determined upon the capture of actuality, do not know that they are agents of Death.
Roland Barthes
Image
It must always be considered as though spoken by a character in a novel
Roland Barthes
Image
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
Image
I call the discourse of power any discourse that engenders blame, hence guilt, in its recipient.
Roland Barthes
Image
Where you are tender, you speak your plural.
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
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.
Roland Barthes
Image
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