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Why is it better to last than to burn?

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
Burn
Lasts
Last
Better

More quotes by Roland Barthes

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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
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Other countries drink to get drunk, and this is accepted by everyone in France, drunkenness is a consequence, never an intention. A drink is felt as the spinning out of a pleasure, not as the necessary cause of an effect which is sought: wine is not only a philtre, it is also the leisurely act of drinking.
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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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
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When we look at a photograph of ourselves or of others, we are really looking at the return of the dead.
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
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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.
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.
Roland Barthes
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I cannot classify the other, for the other is, precisely, Unique, the singular Image which has miraculously come to correspond to the speciality of my desire. The other is the figure of my truth, and cannot be imprisoned in any stereotype (which is the truth of others).
Roland Barthes
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To eat steak rare . . . represents both a nature and a morality.
Roland Barthes
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To make someone wait: the constant prerogative of all power.
Roland Barthes
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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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To dope the racer is as criminal, as sacrilegious, as trying to imitate God it is stealing from God the privilege of the spark.
Roland Barthes
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The author enters into his own death, writing begins.
Roland Barthes
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...language is never innocent.
Roland Barthes
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Through the mythology of Einstein, the world blissfully regained the image of knowledge reduced to a formula.
Roland Barthes
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I love you is unsubtle. It removes explanations, facilities, degrees, scruples.
Roland Barthes
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All official institutions of language are repeating machines: school, sports, advertising, popular songs, news, all continually repeat the same structure, the same meaning, often the same words: the stereotype is a political fact, the major figure of ideology.
Roland Barthes
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To know that one does not write for the other, to know that these things I am going to write will never cause me to be loved by the one I love (the other), to know that writing compensates for nothing, sublimates nothing, that it is precisely there where you are not--this is the beginning of writing.
Roland Barthes
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Every photograph is a certificate of presence.
Roland Barthes