Quotes from Roland Barthes

Through the mythology of Einstein, the world blissfully regained the image of knowledge reduced to a formula.

Fashion postulates an achrony, a time which does not exist; here the past is shameful and the present is constantly "eaten up" by the Fashion being heralded.

Someone tells me: this kind of love is not viable. But how can you evaluate viability? Why is the viable a Good Thing? Why is it better to last than to burn?

I encounter millions of bodies in my life; of these millions, I may desire some hundreds; but of these hundreds, I love only one.

What love lays bare in me is energy.

To whom could I put this question (with any hope of an answer)? Does being able to live without someone you loved mean you loved her less than you thought...?

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.

The bastard form of mass culture is humiliated repetition... always new books, new programs, new films, news items, but always the same meaning.

I love you is unsubtle. It removes explanations, facilities, degrees, scruples.

Literature is that which he can not read without pain, without choking on truth.

The politician being interviewed clearly takes a great deal of trouble to imagine an ending to his sentence: and if he stopped short? His entire policy would be jeopardized!

Flaubert had infinite correction to perform.

Man does not exist prior to language, either as a species or as an individual.

The skyscraper establishes the block, the block creates the street, the street offers itself to man.

Literature is without proofs. By which it must be understood that it cannot prove, not only what it says, but even that it is worth the trouble of saying it.

Myth is neither a lie nor a confession: it is an inflexion.

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.

The realists do not take the photograph for a 'copy' of reality, but for an emanation of past reality, a magic, not an art.

Each of us has his own rhythm of suffering.

The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.

Tout refus du langage est une mort. Any refusal of language is a death.

As soon as someone dies, frenzied construction of the future (shifting furniture, etc.): futuromania.

Television doomed us to the Family, whose household instrument it has become-what the hearth used to be, flanked by the communal kettle.

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.