Quote

Literature is like phosphorus: it shines with its maximum brilliance and the moment when it attempts to die.

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
Maximum
Shining
Literature
Dies
Moment
Phosphorus
Moments
Brilliance
Like
Shines
Attempts

More quotes by 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
Language is neither reactionary nor progressive it is quite simply fascist for fascism does not prevent speech, it compels speech.
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
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.
Roland Barthes
Image
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.
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 love you is unsubtle. It removes explanations, facilities, degrees, scruples.
Roland Barthes
Image
Through the mythology of Einstein, the world blissfully regained the image of knowledge reduced to a formula.
Roland Barthes
Image
The photograph is literally an emanation of the referent. From a real body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me, who am here the duration of the transmission is insignificant the photograph of the missing being, as Sontag says, will touch me like the delayed rays of a star.
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
What I claim is to live to the full the contradiction of my time, which may well make sarcasm the condition of truth.
Roland Barthes
Image
One must turn the tongue seven times in the mouth before speaking.
Roland Barthes
Image
Where you are tender, you speak your plural.
Roland Barthes
Image
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.
Roland Barthes
Image
In an initial period, Photography, in order to surprise, photographs the notable but soon, by a familiar reversal, it decrees notable whatever it photographs. The 'anything whatever' then becomes the sophisticated acme of value.
Roland Barthes
Image
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
Image
Tout refus du langage est une mort. Any refusal of language is a death.
Roland Barthes
Image
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
Image
The art of living has no history: it does not evolve: the pleasure which vanishes vanishes for good, there is no substitute for it. Other pleasures come, which replace nothing. No progress in pleasures, nothing but mutations.
Roland Barthes