Unfortunately, moral beauty in art -- like physical beauty in a person -- is extremely perishable. It is nowhere so durable as artistic or intellectual beauty. Moral beauty has a tendency to decay very rapidly into sententiousness or untimeliness.
Susan Sontag
Related as soon as a work of art is of practical use, betrays a purpose or a tendency its beauty vanishes. AUGUST STRINDBERG The perception of beauty is a moral test. HENRY DAVID THOREAU True beauty is not related to what color your hair is or what color your eyes are. True beauty is ab... ELLEN DEGENERES The most natural beauty in the world is honesty and moral truth. For all beauty is truth. True featu... LORD SHAFTESBURY He that sees the beauty of holiness, or true moral good, sees the greatest and most important thing ... JONATHAN EDWARDS True beauty is about who you are as a human being, your principles, your moral compass. ELLEN DEGENERES Real beauty has no boundaries’. PRAJAKTA MHADNAK As we all know, there is inner beauty and outer beauty. If we examine inner beauty, to me there is n... ALICE GRECZYN I have called her beautiful, because it was her moral beauty that at once attracted me. True beauty ... MAHATMA GANDHI Beauty is composed of an eternal, invariable element whose quantity is extremely difficult to determ... JEAN-LUC GODARD Beauty doesn't have to be about anything. What's a vase about? What's a sunset or a flower ab... DOUGLAS ADAMS It was a sort of ferocious, quiet beauty, the sort that wouldn't let you admire it. The sort of beau... MAGGIE STIEFVATER Love of beauty is taste. The creation of beauty is art. RALPH WALDO EMERSON As time passes by rapidly physical beauty loses its value, but true love remains unchallenged PETER SAYSOMPHANE No synonym for God is so perfect as Beauty. Whether as seen carving the lines of the mountains with ... JOHN MUIR In art economy is always beauty. HENRY JAMES There is BEAUTY in every1, every-thing, every-place.All of life is either LOVE or a call for love. U... ANGIE KARAN There have been many definitions of beauty in art. What is it? Beauty is what the untrained eyes con... EDMOND DE GONCOURT There have been many definitions of beauty in art. What is it? Beauty is what the untrained eyes con... EDMOND AND JULES DE GONCOURT What we have and what is our strength, is our joy in life; our interest in life, in all it moral asp... ASGER JORN You will find beauty in every person and experience if beauty has been cultivated within. BRYANT MCGILL The beauty of beauty is the very centre of beauty. For sometimes its just a superficial coating to u... IAN IJH HOWELL It is generally a feminine eye that first detects the moral deficiencies hidden under the dear decei... GEORGE ELIOT It is generally a feminine eye that first detects the moral deficiencies hidden under the 'dear dece... T.S. ELIOT For me beauty is valued more than anything - the beauty that is manifest in a curved line or in an a... OSCAR NIEMEYER Youth is beauty,Money is beauty, hell beauty is beauty sometimes ANI DIFRANCO Life is one long decay, no? There's a lot of beauty in it. Like the patina in an old city. URS FISCHER The beauty of a finely worked object points to the beauty of the craftsmanship. The beauty of the cr... SAID NURSI Beauty is not just physical. HALLE BERRY But beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins. Intellect is in itself a mode... OSCAR WILDE There is one order of beauty which seems made to turn heads. It is a beauty like that of kittens, or... T.S. ELIOT I'm a romantic. The impressionists have always been my favorites. I like prettiness - beauty, or... PAUL HORN Beauty is not in the face; beauty is a light in the heart KAHLIL GIBRAN Beauty is not in the face; beauty is a light in the heart. KAHLIL GIBRAN All my life, my girlfriends are always skinny. Beauty in art has nothing to do with beauty in realit... FERNANDO BOTERO It is true that nothing here makes any sense, but this is no great misfortune; I learned from the is... MICHAL AJVAZ The Brightness of her cheek would shame those stars as daylight doth a lamp; her eyes in heaven woul... WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE Beauty by design is not as great a gift as beauty inside. KIRPA RAI Beauty is rarely soft or consolatory. Quite the contrary. Genuine beauty is always quite alarming. DONNA TARTT There is Beauty in the Art of Forgiveness LATOSHA NICHOLE There is beauty in the midst of tragedy. As if beauty were condensing in the heart of ugliness. It's... HéLèNE BERR The day knowledge was preferred to wisdom and mere usefulness to beauty. . . . Only a moral revoluti... SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR Beauty in not in the face; beauty is a light in the heart. KAHLIL GIBRAN Beauty can be coaxed out of ugliness. Wabi-sabi is ambivalent about separating beauty from non-beaut... LEONARD KOREN There's more beauty in truth, even if it is dreadful beauty. JOHN STEINBECK Typography is what communication looks like. There is beauty in the language and beauty in the ... JAMES FELICI In the beautiful, man sets himself up as the standard of perfection; in select cases he worships him... FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE The philosophical study of beauty, art, and the splendor of nature nurtures a person’s fertile min... KILROY J. OLDSTER People tend not to use this word beauty because it's not intellectual - but there has to be an o... TADAO ANDO Beauty in art is often nothing but ugliness subdued. JEAN ROSTAND Beauty in art is often nothing but ugliness subdued JEAN ROSTAND Goodness is a special kind of truth and beauty. It is truth and beauty in human behavior. H. A. OVERSTREET Beauty is but the sensible image of the Infinite. Like truth and justice it lives within us; like vi... GEORGE BANCROFT The beauty that emerges from woundedness is a beauty infused with feeling; a beauty different from t... JOHN O'DONOHUE Beauty has as many meanings as man has moods. Beauty is the symbol of symbols. Beauty reveals everyt... OSCAR WILDE Beauty in distress is much the most affecting beauty. EDMUND BURKE There is no a real beauty, only a beauty. There is no a fake beauty only the ugly. EPHDAN Beauty plus pity-that is the closest we can get to a definition of art. Where there is beauty there ... VLADIMIR NABOKOV To own beauty is the first lie of it. CHRIS CAMPANIONI One who only sees beauty in others has inconceivable beauty in himself. MATSHONA DHLIWAYO Such discussions help us very little to enjoy what has been well done in art or poetry, to discrimin... WALTER PATER Outside beauty is a luxury,
Inside beauty is a treasure. JOSHUA SUYA PELICANO Where beauty has no ebb, decay no flood, But joy is wisdom, time an endless song. WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS There is no physical description of Christ in the Gospels, and so we are unable to know whether he w... CHRIS RYAN MGL It is cruel, you know, that music should be so beautiful. It has the beauty of loneliness of pain: o... BENJAMIN BRITTEN Women are mere "beauties" in men's culture so that culture can be kept male. When women in culture s... NAOMI WOLF Physical beauty isn't so impressive to me. DITA VON TEESE Beauty cannot be limited to physical appearances... because beauty can be felt without being seen. REBEKAH ELIZABETH GAMBLE Color contributes to beauty, but it is not beauty. Color should have a minor part in the considerati... JOHANN JOACHIM WINCKELMANN Lois and Alexander are by far the most beautiful creatures in the class; their beauty is like the be... CHRISTOPHER ISHERWOOD Beauty is like the storm. Beauty has its natural motions. A calmness of spirit signals its arrival. ... ANURADHA BHATTACHARYYA Beauty is discernible in your fleeting moments. When you talk; in a smile or a blink of your eye; be... ANURADHA BHATTACHARYYA Honesty is the greatest aphrodisiac. ZAN PERRION Beauty needs a witness. ZAN PERRION It is not fancy hair, gold jewelry, or fine clothes that should make you beautiful. No, your beauty ... ANONYMOUS The earth is always changing...readjusting to our existence. Each era is full of unique challenges VAL UCHENDU When we hear the word 'beauty', we inevitably think that beauty belongs in a special elite r... JOHN O'DONOHUE Beauty is a cheap word, but beauty remains priceless. DEJAN STOJANOVIC Strange that the vanity which accompanies beauty --excusable, perhaps, when there is such great beau... MARY ARNIM Strange that the vanity which accompanies beauty - excusable, perhaps, when there is such great beau... ARISTOTLE If a work of art is rich and vital and complete, those who have artistic instincts will see its beau... OSCAR WILDE Beauty is truth, truth beauty JOHN KEATS When I think of art I think of beauty. Beauty is the mystery of life. It is not in the eye it is in ... AGNES MARTIN It is cruel, you know, that music should be so beautiful. It has the beauty of loneliness and of pai... BENJAMIN BRITTEN The beauty of a woman may be the root of all evil.
but the beauty is a only seen, your eyes wants to... ARVIND YADAV Beauty is also submitted to the taste of time, so a beautiful woman from the Belle Epoch is not exac... KARL LAGERFELD Today, young girls measure the quality of their beauty based upon its entertainment value. The more ... C. JOYBELL C. For thousands of years, human beings have been obsessed with beauty, truth, love, honor, altruism, c... DEEPAK CHOPRA The Lilly in a Christal You have beheld a smiling RoseWhen ... ROBERT HERRICK Þar sem jökulinn ber við loft hættir landið að vera jarðneskt, en jörðin fær hlutdeild í ... HALLDóR LAXNESS ...The beauty and mystery of this world only emerges through affection, attention, interest and comp... ORHAN PAMUK I don't know what it means and I don't care because it's Shakespeare and it's like having jewels in ... FRANK MCCOURT The beauty of enmity is insecurity; the beauty of friendship is in security. ROBERT FROST The ability to see beauty is the beginning of our moral sensibility. What we believe is beautiful we... REVEREND SEAN PARKER DENNISON for you to see beauty here does not mean there is beauty in me it means there is beau... RUPI KAUR Fine art is something wonderful that's left long into the future ... eternal beauty. MASASHI KISHIMOTO Once you've learned to see past physical beauty... You'll be the most beautiful person in the world. FLORANTE T. CORDOVIZ BEAUTY IS BEYOND THE MIRROR BEAUTY LIES IN THE NAKED RAW SOUL...... SHENIKWA MALONE There is beauty, heartbreaking beauty, everywhere. EDWARD ABBEY As long as art is the beauty parlor of civilization, neither art nor civilization is secure JOHN DEWEY
More Susan Sontag
A fiction about soft or easy deaths is part of the mythology of most diseases that are not considere... SUSAN SONTAG The writer is either a practicing recluse or a delinquent, guilt-ridden one; or both. Usually both. SUSAN SONTAG The best emotions to write out of are anger and fear or dread. The least energizing emotion to write... SUSAN SONTAG Lying is the most simple form of self-defence. -Susan Sontag. SUSAN SONTAG A large part of the popularity and persuasiveness of psychology comes from its being a sublimated sp... SUSAN SONTAG The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and eventually in one's own. SUSAN SONTAG It's a pleasure to share one's memories. Everything remembered is dear, endearing, touching, precio... SUSAN SONTAG It is the nature of aphoristic thinking to be always in a state of concluding; a bid to have the fin... SUSAN SONTAG Although none of the rules for becoming more alive is valid, it is healthy to keep on formulating th... 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SUSAN SONTAG Any critic is entitled to wrong judgments, of course. But certain lapses of judgment indicate the ra... SUSAN SONTAG Anything in history or nature that can be described as changing steadily can be seen as heading towa... SUSAN SONTAG What is most beautiful in virile men is sometimes feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women... SUSAN SONTAG Do stuff. be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration's shove or society's kiss on your forehe... SUSAN SONTAG The problems of this world are only truly solved in two ways: by extinction or duplication. SUSAN SONTAG Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers. The questio... SUSAN SONTAG A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world." [Speech upon being awa... SUSAN SONTAG Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager. SUSAN SONTAG Most men experience getting older with regret, apprehension. But most women experience it even more ... SUSAN SONTAG It's a pleasure to share one's memories. Everything remembered is dear, endearing, touching, preciou... SUSAN SONTAG Nature in America has always been suspect, on the defensive, cannibalized by progress. In America, e... SUSAN SONTAG The becoming of man is the history of the exhaustion of his possibilities. SUSAN SONTAG The painter constructs, the photographer discloses. SUSAN SONTAG It is not altogether wrong to say that there is no such thing as a bad photograph -- only less inter... SUSAN SONTAG In America, the photographer is not simply the person who records the past, but the one who invents ... SUSAN SONTAG The taste for worst-case scenarios reflects the need to master fear of what is felt to be uncontroll... SUSAN SONTAG The past itself, as historical change continues to accelerate, has become the most surreal of subjec... SUSAN SONTAG Intelligence is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas. SUSAN SONTAG Any important disease whose causality is murky, and for which treatment is ineffectual, tends to be ... SUSAN SONTAG With the modern diseases (once TB, now cancer) the romantic idea that the disease expresses the char... SUSAN SONTAG The ideology of capitalism makes us all into connoisseurs of liberty -- of the indefinite expansion ... SUSAN SONTAG Boredom is just the reverse side of fascination: both depend on being outside rather than inside a s... SUSAN SONTAG Perversity is the muse of modern literature. SUSAN SONTAG Guns have metamorphosed into cameras in this earnest comedy, the ecology safari, because nature has ... SUSAN SONTAG Ambition if it feeds at all, does so on the ambition of others. SUSAN SONTAG In good films, there is always a directness that entirely frees us from the itch to interpret. SUSAN SONTAG A family's photograph album is generally about the extended family and, often, is all that remains o... SUSAN SONTAG Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest sub... SUSAN SONTAG What pornography is really about, ultimately, isn't sex but death. SUSAN SONTAG What pornographic literature does is precisely to drive a wedge between one's existence as a full hu... SUSAN SONTAG Jews and homosexuals are the outstanding creative minorities in contemporary urban culture. Creative... SUSAN SONTAG I envy paranoids; they actually feel people are paying attention to them. SUSAN SONTAG Ours is a culture based on excess, on overproduction; the result is a steady loss of sharpness in ou... SUSAN SONTAG Camp is a vision of the world in terms of style -- but a particular kind of style. It is love of the... SUSAN SONTAG Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of men... SUSAN SONTAG Victims suggest innocence. And innocence, by the inexorable logic that governs all relational terms,... SUSAN SONTAG Depression is melancholy minus its charms -- the animation, the fits. SUSAN SONTAG We live under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed, destinies: unremitting... SUSAN SONTAG A large part of the popularity and persuasiveness of psychology comes from its being a sublimated sp... SUSAN SONTAG Cancer patients are lied to, not just because the disease is (or is thought to be) a death sentence,... SUSAN SONTAG AIDS occupies such a large part in our awareness because of what it has been taken to represent. It ... SUSAN SONTAG AIDS obliges people to think of sex as having, possibly, the direst consequences: suicide. Or murder... SUSAN SONTAG I do not think white America is committed to granting equality to the American Negro... this is a pa... SUSAN SONTAG Though collecting quotations could be considered as merely an ironic mimetism SUSAN SONTAG The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and eventually in one's own. SUSAN SONTAG Tamed as it may be, sexuality remains one of the demonic forces in human consciousness -- pushing us... SUSAN SONTAG Fear of sexuality is the new, disease-sponsored register of the universe of fear in which everyone n... SUSAN SONTAG The best emotions to write out of are anger and fear or dread. . . . The least energizing emotion ... SUSAN SONTAG What we need is to use what we have. SUSAN SONTAG Sanity is a cozy lie. SUSAN SONTAG It is not suffering as such that is most deeply feared but suffering that degrades. SUSAN SONTAG In the final analysis, style is art. And art is nothing more or less than various modes of stylized,... SUSAN SONTAG The discovery of the good taste of bad taste can be very liberating. The man who insists on high and... SUSAN SONTAG Taste has no system and no proofs. SUSAN SONTAG The hard truth is that what may be acceptable in elite culture may not be acceptable in mass culture... SUSAN SONTAG One set of messages of the society we live in is: Consume. Grow. Do what you want. Amuse yourselves.... SUSAN SONTAG What is most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women... SUSAN SONTAG The truth is always something that is told, not something that is known. If there were no speaking o... SUSAN SONTAG I don't want to express alienation. It isn't what I feel. I'm interested in various kind... SUSAN SONTAG Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs. SUSAN SONTAG The past itself, as historical change continues to accelerate, has become the most surreal of subjec... SUSAN SONTAG The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and eventually in one's own. SUSAN SONTAG To take a photograph is to participate in another person's mortality, vulnerability, mutability.... SUSAN SONTAG As photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal, they also help people t... SUSAN SONTAG Life is not significant details, illuminated by a flash, fixed forever. Photographs are. SUSAN SONTAG The truth is balance. However the opposite of truth, which is unbalance, may not be a lie. SUSAN SONTAG The life of the creative man is lead, directed and controlled by boredom. Avoiding boredom is one of... SUSAN SONTAG I was not looking for my dreams to interpret my life, but rather for my life to interpret my dreams. SUSAN SONTAG The only interesting answers are those that destroy the questions. SUSAN SONTAG Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art. SUSAN SONTAG Mallarme said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything exists... SUSAN SONTAG Silence remains, inescapably, a form of speech. SUSAN SONTAG What is the most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine w... SUSAN SONTAG Lying is the most simple form of self-defence. SUSAN SONTAG It is not altogether wrong to say that there is no such thing as a bad photograph - only less intere... SUSAN SONTAG Surrealism is a bourgeois disaffection; that its militants thought it universal is only one of the s... SUSAN SONTAG For those who live neither with religious consolations about death nor with a sense of death (or of ... SUSAN SONTAG The love of the famous, like all strong passions, is quite abstract. Its intensity can be measured m... SUSAN SONTAG To paraphrase several sages: Nobody can think and hit someone at the same time. SUSAN SONTAG The fear of becoming old is born of the recognition that one is not living now the life that one wis... SUSAN SONTAG Depression is melancholy minus its charms - the animation, the fits. SUSAN SONTAG Authoritarian political ideologies have a vested interest in promoting fear, a sense of the imminenc... SUSAN SONTAG Existence is no more than the precarious attainment of relevance in an intensely mobile flux of past... SUSAN SONTAG Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, th... SUSAN SONTAG My library is an archive of longings. SUSAN SONTAG We like to stress the commonness of heroes. Essences seem undemocratic. We feel oppressed by the cal... SUSAN SONTAG The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art - and, by analogy, our own exper... SUSAN SONTAG We are told we must choose — the old or the new. In fact, we must choose both. What is a life if n... SUSAN SONTAG Religion is probably, after sex, the second oldest resource which human beings have available to the... SUSAN SONTAG Volume depends precisely on the writer's having been able to sit in a room every day, year after yea... SUSAN SONTAG I was not looking for my dreams to interpret my life, but rather for my life to interpret my dreams SUSAN SONTAG I don’t care about someone being intelligent; any situation between people, when they are really h... SUSAN SONTAG Fewer and fewer Americans possess objects that have a patina, old furniture, grandparents pots and p... SUSAN SONTAG Using a camera appeases the anxiety which the work-driven feel about not working when they are on va... SUSAN SONTAG Theories that diseases are caused by mental states and can be cured by will power, are always an ind... SUSAN SONTAG Much of modern art is devoted to lowering the threshold of what is terrible. By getting us used to w... SUSAN SONTAG Depression is melancholy minus its charms. SUSAN SONTAG Victims suggest innocence. And innocence, by the inexorable logic that governs all relational term... SUSAN SONTAG The standard that a society should actually embody its own professed principles is a utopian one, in... SUSAN SONTAG Fewer and fewer Americans possess objects that have a patina, old furniture, grandparents pots and p... SUSAN SONTAG Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art. Even more. It is the revenge of the intelle... SUSAN SONTAG A family's photograph album is generally about the extended family and, often, is all that remai... SUSAN SONTAG I do not think white America is committed to granting equality to the American Negro. This is a pass... SUSAN SONTAG Camp is a vision of the world in terms of style-but a particular style. It is the love of the exagge... SUSAN SONTAG 'Camp' is a vision of the world in terms of style - but a particular style. It is the love o... SUSAN SONTAG It is not the position, but the disposition. SUSAN SONTAG The only interesting answers are those which destroy the questions SUSAN SONTAG Making social comment is an artificial place for an artist to start from. If an artist is touched by... SUSAN SONTAG To take a photograph is to participate in another person's mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Pre... SUSAN SONTAG Photographs objectify: they turn an event or a person into something that can be possessed. SUSAN SONTAG Is there an antidote to the perennial seductiveness of war? And is this a question a woman is more l... SUSAN SONTAG Narratives can make us understand. Photographs do something else: they haunt us. SUSAN SONTAG All memory is individual, unreproducible - it dies with each person. What is called collective memor... SUSAN SONTAG The ideology of capitalism makes us all into connoisseurs of liberty - of the indefinite expansion o... SUSAN SONTAG American "energy." . . is the energy of violence, of free-floating resentment and anxiety unleashed ... SUSAN SONTAG Today everything exists to end in a photograph. SUSAN SONTAG All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or t... SUSAN SONTAG Boredom is just the reverse side of fascination: both depend on being outside rather than inside a s... SUSAN SONTAG Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citiz... SUSAN SONTAG Anthropology has always struggled with an intense, fascinated repulsion towards its subject. . . . [... SUSAN SONTAG People don't become inured to what they are shown - if that's the right way to describe what happens... SUSAN SONTAG So far as we feel sympathy, we feel we are not accomplices to what caused the suffering. Our sympath... SUSAN SONTAG All struggle, all resistance is -- must be -- concrete. And all struggle has a global resonance. If ... SUSAN SONTAG To suffer is one thing; another thing is living with the photographed images of suffering, which doe... SUSAN SONTAG Life is not about significant details, illuminated a flash, fixed forever. Photographs ar... SUSAN SONTAG Desire has no history... SUSAN SONTAG Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism... SUSAN SONTAG Photographs are a way of imprisoning reality...One can't possess reality, one can possess images--on... SUSAN SONTAG Most people in this society who aren't actively mad are, at best, reformed or potential lunatics... SUSAN SONTAG Every culture has its southerners -- people who work as little as they can, preferring to dance, dri... SUSAN SONTAG How much self-love comes in the guise of selfless devotion! SUSAN SONTAG As objects of contemplation, images of the atrocious can answer to several different needs. To steel... SUSAN SONTAG Today is such a time, when the project of interpretation is largely reactionary, stifling. Like the ... SUSAN SONTAG I haven't been everywhere, but it's on my list. SUSAN SONTAG Each of us carries a room within ourselves, waiting to be furnished and peopled, and if you listen c... SUSAN SONTAG [O]ne person's 'barbarian' is another person's 'just doing what everybody else is doing. SUSAN SONTAG Do stuff. Be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration's shove or society's kiss on your forehe... SUSAN SONTAG Detachment is the prerogative of an elite; and as the dandy is the nineteenth century's surrogate fo... SUSAN SONTAG A large part of the popularity and persuasiveness of psychology comes from its being a sublimated sp... SUSAN SONTAG Lying is an elementary means of self-defense. SUSAN SONTAG Perhaps it is our perennial fate to be surprised by the simultaneity of events, by the sheer extensi... SUSAN SONTAG Rules of taste enforce structures of power. SUSAN SONTAG Read a lot. Expect something big, something exalting or deepening from a book. No book is worth read... SUSAN SONTAG All photographs are memento mori. SUSAN SONTAG With the modern diseases (once TB, now cancer) the romantic idea that the disease expresses the char... SUSAN SONTAG The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art / and, by analogy, our own exper... SUSAN SONTAG The freakish is no longer a private zone, difficult of access. People who are bizarre, in sexual dis... SUSAN SONTAG Photographs that depict suffering shouldn't be beautiful, as captions shouldn't moralize, SUSAN SONTAG Authoritarian political ideologies have a vested interest in promoting fear, a sense of the imminenc... SUSAN SONTAG This city is neither a jungle nor the moon. . . . In long shot: a cosmic smudge, a conglomerate of b... SUSAN SONTAG The past itself, as historical change continues to accelerate, has become the most surreal of subjec... SUSAN SONTAG It's fantastic knowing you're going to die; it really makes having priorities and trying to follow t... SUSAN SONTAG A photograph is not only an image (as a painting is an image), an interpretation of the real; it is ... SUSAN SONTAG The fact that illness is associated with the poor --who are, from the perspective of the privileged,... SUSAN SONTAG The Way We Live Now SUSAN SONTAG Of course the movies are going to be the more visible, more high profile, for the simple reason that... SUSAN SONTAG In the final analysis, ''style'' is art. And art is nothing more or less than various modes of styli... SUSAN SONTAG He who despises himself esteems himself as a self-despiser. SUSAN SONTAG With more people, there are more voices to tune out. SUSAN SONTAG Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art. SUSAN SONTAG Societies need to have one illness which becomes identified with evil, and attaches blame to its "vi... SUSAN SONTAG Al forms of consensus about ''great'' books and ''perennial'' problems, once stabilized, tend to det... SUSAN SONTAG The aestheticizing tendency of photography is such that the medium which conveys distress ends by ne... SUSAN SONTAG It seems positively unnatural to travel without taking a camera along... The very activity of taking... SUSAN SONTAG But maybe they were barbarians. Maybe this is what most barbarians look like. They look like everybo... SUSAN SONTAG Dissimulation, secretiveness, appear a necessity to the melancholic. He has complex, often veiled re... SUSAN SONTAG It hurts to love. It's like giving yourself to be flayed and knowing that at any moment the other pe... SUSAN SONTAG One feature of the usual script for plague: the disease invariably comes from somewhere else. The na... SUSAN SONTAG The basic unit for contemporary art is not the idea, but the analysis of and extension of sensations... SUSAN SONTAG [Perhaps this is a good thing. And potentially dangerous for a novelist. The dangers are obvious. A ... SUSAN SONTAG Guns have metamorphosed into cameras in this earnest comedy, the ecology safari, because nature has ... SUSAN SONTAG The taste for quotations (and for the juxtaposition of incongruous quotations) is a Surrealist taste... SUSAN SONTAG Books are funny little portable pieces of thought. SUSAN SONTAG Ours is a culture based on excess, on overproduction; the result is a steady loss of sharpness in ou... SUSAN SONTAG What is most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women... SUSAN SONTAG Perversity is the muse of modern literature SUSAN SONTAG What pornographic literature does is precisely to drive a wedge between one's existence as a sexual ... SUSAN SONTAG It's a pleasure to share one's memories. Everything remembered is dear, endearing, touching, preciou... SUSAN SONTAG My idea of a writer: someone interested in 'everything,' SUSAN SONTAG I envy paranoids; they actually feel people are paying attention to them SUSAN SONTAG The quality of American life is an insult to the possibilities of human growth. . . the pollution of... SUSAN SONTAG Most people in this society who aren't actively mad are, at best, reformed or potential lunatics. SUSAN SONTAG A great private collection is a material concentrate that continually stimulates, that overexcites. ... SUSAN SONTAG