Roland Barthes
Roland Barthes
Roland Gérard Bartheswas a French literary theorist, philosopher, linguist, critic, and semiotician. Barthes' ideas explored a diverse range of fields and he influenced the development of schools of theory including structuralism, semiotics, social theory, design theory, anthropology and post-structuralism...
NationalityFrench
ProfessionPhilosopher
Date of Birth12 November 1915
CountryFrance
Roland Barthes quotes about
sports wrestling thinking
There are people who think that wrestling is an ignoble sport. Wrestling is not sport, it is a spectacle, and it is no more ignoble to attend a wrestled performance of suffering than a performance of the sorrows of Arnolphe or Andromaque.
dream men expression
Eiffel saw his Tower in the form of a serious object, rational, useful; men return it to him in the form of a great baroque dream which quite naturally touches on the borders of the irrational ... architecture is always dream and function, expression of a utopia and instrument of a convenience.
photography thinking pensive
Ultimately, Photography is subversive, not when it frightens, repels, or even stigmatizes, but when it is pensive, when it thinks.
heart television instruments
Television doomed us to the Family, whose household instrument it has become-what the hearth used to be, flanked by the communal kettle.
description
A picture is never anything but its own plural description.
sorrow unhappy desire
I am simultaneously and contradictorily both happy and unhappy: 'to succeed' or 'to fail' have for me only ephemeral, contingent meanings (this does not stop my desires and sorrows from being violent ones); what impels me, secretly and obstinately, is not tactical: I accept and I affirm, irrespective of the true and the false, of success and failure; I am withdrawn from all finality, I live according to chance...
tongue mouths seven
One must turn the tongue seven times in the mouth before speaking.
sound watches bells
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.
unique desire stereotype
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).
knowledge world mythology
Through the mythology of Einstein, the world blissfully regained the image of knowledge reduced to a formula.
morality steak
To eat steak rare . . . represents both a nature and a morality.
portraits photographer
Great portrait photographers are great mythologists.
photography art past
The realists do not take the photograph for a 'copy' of reality, but for an emanation of past reality, a magic, not an art.
sacrifice evil forgiving
The Ventoux is a god of Evil, to which sacrifices must be made. It never forgives weakness and extracts an unfair tribute of suffering.