338 Quotes by Roland Barthes

This would be the structure of the “successful” couple: a little prohibition, a good deal of play; to designate desire and then to leave it alone, like those obliging natives who show you the path but don’t insist on accompanying you on your way.

Incoherence seems to me preferable to a distorting order.

Here and there, on the trees, some leaves remain. And I often stand deep in thought before them. I contemplate a leaf and attach my hope to it. When the wind plays with the leaf, I tremble in every limb. And if it should fall, alas, my hope falls with it.” – Schubert.

The photograph touches me if I withdraw it from its usual blah-blah: “Technique,” “Reality,” “Reportage,” “Art,” etc.: to say nothing, to shut my eyes, to allow the detail to rise of its own accord into affective consciousness.

The gift is contact, sensuality: you will be touching what I have touched, a third skin unites us.

Suffering; impossibility of being comfortable anywhere; oppression, irritations and remorse one after the next, everything under the sign “wretchedness of man,” used by Pascal.

I have tried to be as eclectic as I possibly can with my professional life, and so far it’s been pretty fun.

In an initial period, Photography, in order to surprise, photographs the notable; but soon, by a familiar reversal, it decrees notable whatever it photographs. The ‘anything whatever’ then becomes the sophisticated acme of value.

Horrible figure of mourning: acedia, hard-heartedness: irritability, impotence to love. Anguished because I don’t know how to restore generosity to my life – or love. How to love?