Like the collector, the photographer is animated by a passion that, even when it appears to be for the present, is linked to a sense of the past.
Susan SontagRead
The becoming of man is the history of the exhaustion of his possibilities.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote suggests that as humans grow and evolve, they deplete their potential and options over time.
Susan Sontag's quote reflects on the trajectory of human existence, positing that the journey of becoming a fully realized person is intertwined with the gradual exhaustivity of our choices and possibilities. It suggests that with each decision we make or each path we take, we are limiting ourselves to certain outcomes while simultaneously exploring and realizing our true potential. The history of a person's life, then, is not just a chronicle of achievements but also a reflection on the paths not taken and the potential that fades as we age and grow.
Themes
PossibilitiesHistoryManExhaustionPotential
In practice
Example use cases
In a motivational speech about personal growth and choices.
More from Susan Sontag
All quotes βScience fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art.
Susan SontagRead
Gide and I have attained such perfect intellectual communion that I experience the appropriate labor pains for every thought he gives birth to!
Susan SontagRead
Volume depends precisely on the writer's having been able to sit in a room every day, year after year, alone.
Susan SontagRead
In NY sensuality completely turns into sexuality - no objects for the senses to respond to, no beautiful river, houses, people. Awful smells of the street, and dirt... Nothing except eating, if that, and the frenzy of the bed.
Susan SontagRead
It hurts to love. It's like giving yourself to be flayed and knowing that at any moment the other person may just walk off with your skin.
Susan SontagRead
Similar quotes
Heaven does without doing through its purity, Earth does without doing through its calmness.
ZhuangziRead
I think that if one is faced by inevitable destruction -- if a house is falling upon you, for instance -- one must feel a great longing to sit down, close one's eyes and wait, come what may . . .
Fyodor DostoevskyRead
Curiosity, n. An objectionable quality of the female mind. The desire to know whether or not a woman is cursed with curiosity is one of the most active and insatiable passions of the masculine soul.
Ambrose BierceRead
So we must lay it down that the association which is a state exists not for the purpose of living together but for the sake of noble actions.
AristotleRead
It is the nature of all greatness not to be exact.
Edmund BurkeRead
In the immediate as well as the symbolic sense, in the physical as well as the intellectual sense, we are at any moment those who separate the connected, or connect the separate.
Georg SimmelRead