Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
When we look at a photograph of ourselves or of others, we are really looking at the return of the dead.
Roland Barthes
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
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
Looking
Others
Look
Looks
Really
Photograph
Return
Dead
More quotes by Roland Barthes
I love you is unsubtle. It removes explanations, facilities, degrees, scruples.
Roland Barthes
Why is it better to last than to burn?
Roland Barthes
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
Ultimately — or at the limit — in order to see a photograph well, it is best to look away or close your eyes. 'The necessary condition for an image is sight,'Janouch told Kafka and Kafka smiled and replied: 'We photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds. My stories are a way of shutting my eyes.
Roland Barthes
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
As Spectator I wanted to explore photography not as a question (a theme) but as a wound.
Roland Barthes
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
Myth is neither a lie nor a confession: it is an inflexion.
Roland Barthes
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
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
Language is neither reactionary nor progressive it is quite simply fascist for fascism does not prevent speech, it compels speech.
Roland Barthes
Each of us has his own rhythm of suffering.
Roland Barthes
Literature is like phosphorus: it shines with its maximum brilliance and the moment when it attempts to die.
Roland Barthes
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
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
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.
Roland Barthes
One must turn the tongue seven times in the mouth before speaking.
Roland Barthes
...language is never innocent.
Roland Barthes
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
Henceforth I would have to cosent to combine two voices: the voice of banality (to say what everyone sees and knows) and the voice of singularity (to replenish such banality with all the élan of an emotion which belonged only to myself).
Roland Barthes
