Today there is no symbolic compensation for old age, no recognition of a specific value: wisdom, perceptiveness, experience, vision.

— Roland Barthes

To know that one does not write for the other, to know that these things I am going to write will never cause me to be loved by the one I love (the other), to know that writing compensates for nothing, sublimates nothing, that it is precisely there where you are not--this is the beginning of writing.

— Roland Barthes

To make someone wait: the constant prerogative of all power, "age-old pastime of humanity".

— Roland Barthes

To whom could I put this question (with any hope of an answer)? Does being able to live without someone you loved to mean you loved her less than you thought...?

— Roland Barthes

Ultimately — or at the limit — in order to see a photograph well, it is best to look away or close your eyes. 'The necessary condition for an image is sight,'Jan ouch told Kafka; and Kafka smiled and replied: 'We photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds. My stories are a way of shutting my eyes.

— Roland Barthes

Usually the amateur is defined as an immature state of the artist: someone who cannot — or will not — achieve the mastery of a profession. But in the field of photographic practice, it is the amateur, on the contrary, who is the assumption of the professional: for it is he who stands closer to the (i)Nome(i) of Photography.

— Roland Barthes

We don’t forget, but something vacant settles in us.

— Roland Barthes

We know that the war against intelligence is always waged in the name of common sense.

— Roland Barthes

We know the original relation of the theater and the cult of the Dead: the first actors separated themselves from the community by playing the role of the Dead: to make oneself up was to designate oneself as a body simultaneously living and dead: the whitened bust of the totemic theater, the man with the painted face in the Chinese theater, the rice-paste makeup of the Indian Kathy-Kali, the Japanese No mask ... Now it is this same relation which I find in the Photograph; however 'lifelike' we strive to make it (and this frenzy to be lifelike can only be our mythic denial of an apprehension of death), Photography is a kind of primitive theater, a kind of Tableau Giant, a figuration of the motionless and made-up face beneath which we see the dead.

— Roland Barthes

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