Roland Barthes Quotes

What the human eye sees is an illusion of what is real. The black and white image transforms illusions into another reality.

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,'Janouch 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.

The image is an image.

A photograph is always invisible, it is not it that we see.

Because of this the representation I'm interested in is of those things only the eye can touch.

You can't really say what is beautiful about a place, but the image of the place will remain vividly with you.

The faces people make when they are photographed and the face they have when you draw them are very different.

Things seen are mightier than things heard.

Our sight is the most perfect and most delightful of all our senses.

The line between the reality that is photographed because it seems beautiful to us and the reality that seems beautiful because it has been photographed is very narrow.

Sight is the noblest sense of man.

An optical impression is produced on our organs of sight which makes us classify as light, half-tone or quartertone, the surfaces represented by colour sensations. So that light does not exist for the painter.

We are as much as we see. Faith is sight and knowledge. The hands only serve the eyes.

The visual does seem to me the most thoroughly grasped and recorded among my impressions; sight seems to be my principal sense organ, and "seeing" supplies the key metaphors for reporting the perception.

But we have been taught to see before our eyes have found out a way of seeing for themselves.

It is my eyes which see, and the sight of my eyes grants beauty to the earth.

Why is a picture of something real eventually more exciting than the thing itself?

We do not know what things look like. We know what things are like. It must be a very limiting thing,this seeing. -Aunt Beast

Some of us come on earth seeing – some of us come on earth seeing color.

It is only with the eyes open that a corporeal form returns, and assembles itself firmly around the hard core of sight.

Is it even always an advantage to replace an indistinct picture by a sharp one? Isn't the indistinct one often what we need?

Those who by form did see me and those who followed me by voice. Wrong the efforts they engaged in, those people will not see me.

How many colors are there in a field of grass to the crawling baby unaware of 'Green'?

What you see with your eyes is not necessarily real.

The world of sight is still limitless. It is the artist who limits vision to the cramped dimensions of his own ego.