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

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

More quotes by 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.
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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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Isn’t the most sensitive point of this mourning the fact that I must lose a language — the amorous language? No more ‘I love you’s.
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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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I want to be both pathetic and admirable, I want to be at the same time a child and an adult. Thereby I gamble, I take a risk: for it is always possible that the other will simply ask no question whatever about these unaccustomed glasses that the other will see, in the fact, no sign.
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For the theatre one needs long arms it is better to have them too long than too short. An artiste with short arms can never, never make a fine gesture.
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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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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?
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All of a sudden it didn't bother me not being modern.
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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.
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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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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
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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.
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The realists do not take the photograph for a 'copy' of reality, but for an emanation of past reality, a magic, not an art.
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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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To eat, to speak, to sing (need we add: to kiss?) are operations which have the same site of the body for origin.
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What love lays bare in me is energy.
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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
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Literature is the question minus the answer.
Roland Barthes
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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