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 Copy Share Image
Isn’t desire always the same, whether the object is present or absent? Isn’t the object always absent? —This isn’t the same languor: there are two words: Pothos, desire for the absent being, and Himéros, the more burning desire for the… — Roland Barthes Copy Share Image
“Werther identifies himself with the madman, with the footman. As a reader, I can identify myself with Werther. Historically, thousands of subjects have done… — Roland Barthes Copy Share
“Valéry used to speak of those people who die in an accident because they are unwilling to let go of their umbrellas; how many… — Roland Barthes Copy Share
Today there is no symbolic compensation for old age, no recognition of a specific value: wisdom, perceptiveness, experience, vision. — Roland Barthes Copy Share
The unary Photograph has every reason to be banal, 'unity' of composition being the first rule of vulgar (and notably, of academic) rhetoric: 'The… — Roland Barthes Copy Share
“Man does not exist prior to language, either as a species or as an individual. We never encounter a state where man is separated… — Roland Barthes Copy Share
“It is said that Time soothes mourning – No, Time makes nothing happen; it merely makes the emotivity of mourning pass.” — Roland Barthes Copy Share
“So long as I perceive the world as hostile, I remain linked to it: *I am not crazy*. But sometimes, once my bad temper… — Roland Barthes Copy Share
I think that cars today are almost the exact equivalent of the great Gothic cathedrals: I mean the supreme creation of an era, conceived… — Roland Barthes Copy Share
“(Sartre) (The world is full without me, as in Nausea; the world plays at living behind a glass partition; the world is in an… — Roland Barthes Copy Share
“Like love, mourning affects the world—and the worldly—with unreality, with importunity. I resist the world, I suffer from what it demands of me, from… — Roland Barthes Copy Share
“There is an age at which we teach what we know. Then comes another age at which we teach what we do not know;… — Roland Barthes Copy Share
As a jealous man, I suffer four times over: because I am jealous, because I blame myself for being so, because I fear that… — Roland Barthes Copy Share
