338 Quotes by Roland Barthes

…once can easily see in an object at once a perfection and an absence of origin, a closure and a brilliance, a transformation of life into matter (matter is much more magical than life), and in a word a silence which belongs to the realm of fairy-tales.

People tell you to keep your "courage" up. But the time for courage is when she was sick, when I took care of her and saw her suffering, her sadness, and when I had to conceal my tears. Constantly one had to make a decision, put on a mask and that was courage.--Now, courage means the will to live and there's all too much of that.

Socrates's daimon (the one who spoke first within him ) whispered to him: no. My daimon, on the contrary, is my stupidity: like the Nietzschean ass, I say yes to everything, in the field of my love.

ETYMOLOGY: “Panic” relates to the god Pan; but we can play on etymologies as on words (as has always been done) and pretend to believe that “panic” comes from the Greek adjective that means “everything.

What right does my present have to speak of my past? Has my present some advantage over my past? What "grace" might have enlightened me? except that of passing time, or of a good cause, encountered on my way?

The photographic image is a message without a code.

...The editors of (i)Life(i) rejected Kerész'a photographs when he arrived in the United States in 1937 because, they said, his images 'spoke too much'; they made us reflect, suggested a meaning — a different meaning from the literal one. Ultimately, Photography is subversive not when it frightens, repels, or even stigmatizes, but when it is (i)pensive(i), when it thinks.

Now take all the delights of the earth, melt them into one single delight, and cast it entire into a single man - all this will be as nothing to the delight of which I speak.

However paradoxical it may seem, myth hides nothing: its function is to distort, not to make disappear.