Roland Barthes quotes - page 3

The lover's fatal identity is precisely this: I am the one who waits. (Roland Barthes)
Writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin. View quote
Roland Barthes
A work has two levels of meaning: literal and concealed. View quote
Roland Barthes
The Text is plural. Which is not simply to say that it has several meanings, but that it accomplishes the very plural of meaning: an irreducible (and not merely an acceptable) plural. View quote
Roland Barthes
The theory of the Text can coincide only with a practice of writing. View quote
Roland Barthes
The bastard form of mass culture is humiliated repetition... always new books, new programs, new films, news items, but always the same meaning. View quote
Roland Barthes
The Text is plural. Which is not simply to say that it has several meanings, but that it accomplishes the very plural of meaning: an irreducible (and not merely an acceptable) plural. The Text is not a co-existence of meanings but a passage, an overcrossing; thus it answers not to an interpretation, even a liberal one, but to an explosion, a dissemination. View quote
Roland Barthes
The discourse on the Text should itself be nothing other than text, research, textual activity, since the Text is that social space which leaves no language safe, outside, nor any subject of the enunciation in position as judge, master, analyst, confessor, decoder. The theory of the Text can coincide only with a practice of writing. View quote
Roland Barthes
Every photograph is a certificate of presence. View quote
Roland Barthes
New York. . . is a city of geometric heights, a petrified desert of grids and lattices, an inferno of greenish abstraction under a flat sky, a real Metropolis from which man is absent by his very accumulation. View quote
Roland Barthes
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)
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. View quote
Roland Barthes
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. View quote
Roland Barthes
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. View quote
Roland Barthes
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 philter, it is also the leisurely act of drinking. View quote
Roland Barthes
The bourgeoisie is defined as the social class which does not want to be named. View quote
Roland Barthes
Statistically, myth is on the right. There, it is essential, well-fed, sleek, expensive, garrulous, it invents itself ceaselessly. It takes hold of everything, all aspects of the law, of morality, of aesthetics, of diplomacy, of household equipment, of Literature, of entertainment. View quote
Roland Barthes
A work has two levels of meaning: literal and concealed. A Text, on the other hand is engaged in a movement ... a deferral ... a dilation of meaning ... the play of signification. Metonymy - the association of part to whole - characterized the logic of the Text. In this sense the Text is "radically symbolic" and lacks closure. View quote
Roland Barthes