338 Quotes by Roland Barthes

The measurement of mourning: eighteen months for mourning a father, a mother.

It is said that Time soothes mourning – No, Time makes nothing happen; it merely makes the emotivity of mourning pass.

To whom can 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... ?

Todo lo que es anacrónico es obsceno. Como divinidad (moderna), la Historia es represiva, la Historia nos prohíbe ser inactuales. Del pasado, no soportamos más que la ruina, el monumento, el kitsch o el retro, que es divertido; reducimos ese pasado a su sola rúbrica.

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.

Si consideramos el sentido de esta manera, es decir, teniendo en cuenta sus relaciones con la institución o las instituciones, advertimos que en realidad se trata de un problema muy candente; desde hace siglos, casi todos los combates ideológicos de la humanidad, en cualquier caso de la humanidad occidental, son combates del sentido; en teología, en sociología o precisamente en filología, las polémicas, incluso combates muy violentos, siempre tienen lugar en torno a una interpretación.

(A squeeze of the hand—enormous documentation—a tiny gesture within the palm, a knee which doesn't move away, an arm extended, as if quite naturally, along the back of a sofa and against which the other's head gradually comes to rest—this is the paradisiac realm of subtle and clandestine signs: a kind of festival not of the senses but of meaning.)

To expend oneself, to bestir oneself for an impenetrable object is pure religion. To make the other into an insoluble riddle on which my life depends is to consecrate the other as a god; I shall never manage to solve the question the other asks me, the lover is not Oedipus. Then all that is left for me to do is to reverse my ignorance into truth.

Toys here reveal the list of all the things the adult does not find unusual: war, bureaucracy, ugliness, Martians, etc. It is not so much, in fact, the imitation which is the sign of an abdication, as its literalness: French toys are like a Jivaro head, in which one recognises, shrunken to the size of an apple, the wrinkles and hair of an adult.