"The best principals are not heroes; they are hero makers."
― Roland Barthes
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"The photographic image is a message without a code."
― Roland Barthes |
"I want to be both pathetic and admirable, I want to be at the same time a child and an adult. Thereby I gamble, I take a risk: for it is always possible that the other will simply ask no question whatever about these unaccustomed glasses; that the other will see, in the fact, no sign."
― Roland Barthes |
"I am interested in language because it wounds or seduces me."
― Roland Barthes |
"The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture."
― Roland Barthes |
"Every exploration is an appropriation."
― Roland Barthes
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"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?"
― Roland Barthes
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"A light without shadow generates an emotion without reserve."
― Roland Barthes
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"This endured absence is nothing more or less than forgetfulness. I am, intermittently, unfaithful. This is the condition of my survival."
― Roland Barthes
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"Those who fail to reread are obliged to read the same story everywhere."
― Roland Barthes
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"The Ventoux is a god of Evil, to which sacrifices must be made. It never forgives weakness and extracts an unfair tribute of suffering."
― Roland Barthes
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"I have not a desire but a need for solitude."
― Roland Barthes
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"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
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"Rarely do outside of school remedies work their way into the fabric of the schools or into the teachers lives, and more rarely into the classrooms. Therefore they only offer a modest hope of influencing the basic culture of school"
― Roland Barthes
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"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 |
"What I enjoy in a narrative is not directly its content or even its structure, but rather the abrasions"
― Roland Barthes |
"I passed beyond the unreality of the thing represented, I entered crazily into the spectacle, into the image, taking into my arms what is dead, what is going to die."
― Roland Barthes
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"Wine is a part of society because it provides a basis not only for a morality but also for an environment; it is an ornament in the slightest ceremonials of French daily life."
― Roland Barthes |
"One must turn the tongue seven times in the mouth before speaking."
― Roland Barthes
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"To try to write love is to confront the muck of language: that region of hysteria where language is both too much and too little, excessive and impoverished."
― Roland Barthes |
"It is no longer the sexual which is indecent, it is the sentimental."
― Roland Barthes
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"Frontiers are physical as well as symbolic constructions."
― Roland Barthes
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"Why is it better to last than to burn?"
― Roland Barthes
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"Literature is like phosphorus: it shines with its maximum brilliance and the moment when it attempts to die."
― Roland Barthes
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"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."
― Roland Barthes
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"Literature is that which he can not read without pain, without choking on truth."
― Roland Barthes
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"The skyscraper establishes the block, the block creates the street, the street offers itself to man."
― Roland Barthes
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"To dope the racer is as criminal, as sacrilegious, as trying to imitate God; it is stealing from God the privilege of the spark."
― Roland Barthes
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"Man does not exist prior to language, either as a species or as an individual."
― Roland Barthes |
"If I had to create a god, I would lend him a “slow understanding”: a kind of drip-by-drip understanding of problems. People who understand quickly frighten me."
― Roland Barthes |
"Is not the most erotic part of the body wherever the clothing affords a glimpse?"
― Roland Barthes |
"He who reads a story only once is condemned to read the same story his whole life."
― Roland Barthes
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"The lover's fatal identity is precisely this: I am the one who waits."
― 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..."
― Roland Barthes
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"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."
― Roland Barthes
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"The incapacity to name is a good symptom of disturbance."
― Roland Barthes
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"All of a sudden it didn't bother me not being modern."
― Roland Barthes
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"Thus every writer's motto reads: mad I cannot be, sane I do not deign to be, neurotic I am."
― Roland Barthes
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"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
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"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
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"For the theatre one needs long arms; it is better to have them too long than too short. An artiste with short arms can never, never make a fine gesture."
― Roland Barthes
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"The necessary condition for an image is sight."
― Roland Barthes
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Nationality: French |
Born:November 12, 1915, Cherbourg- Octeville, Cherbourg-en-Cotentin, France
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Famous As:
Philosopher,Literary Theorist,Essayist, , Critic, and Semiotician
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