Where there is meaning, there is paradigm, and where there is paradigm (opposition), there is meaning .. . elliptically put: meaning rests on conflict (the choice of one term against another), and all conflict is generative of meaning: to choose one and refuse the other is always a sacrifice made to meaning, to produce meaning, to offer it to be consumed. Roland Barthes
Some Similar Quotes
  1. The menu is not the meal. - Alan W. Watts

  2. Words are the clothes thoughts wear. - Samuel Beckett

  3. When a language dies, a way of understanding the world dies with it, a way of looking at the world. - George Steiner

  4. Philosophy, as we use the word, is a fight against the fascination which forms of expression exert upon us. - Ludwig Wittgenstein

  5. Words are made for a certain exactness of thought, as tears are for a certain degree of pain. What is least distinct cannot be named; what is clearest is unutterable. - Unknown

More Quotes By Roland Barthes
  1. You see the first thing we love is a scene. For love at first sight requires the very sign of its suddenness; and of all things, it is the scene which seems to be seen best for the first time: a curtain parts and what...

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

  3. (Love’s atopia, characteristic which causes it to escape all dissertations, would be that *ultimately* it is possible to talk about love only *according to a strict allocutive determination*; whether philosophical, gnomic, lyric, or novelistic, there is always, in the discourse upon love, a person whom...

  4. …This singular reversal may perhaps proceed from the fact that for us the “subject” (since Christianity) is the one who suffers: where there is a wound, there is a subject: die Wunde! die Wunde! says Parsifal, thereby becoming “himself”; and the deeper the wound, at...

  5. Gossip reduces the other to he/she, and this reduction is intolerable to me. For me the other is neither he nor she; the other has only a name of his own, or her own name. The third-person pronoun is a wicked pronoun: it is the...

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