A Quote by Susan Sontag

As objects of contemplation, images of the atrocious can answer to several different needs. To steel oneself against weakness. To make oneself more numb. To acknowledge the existence of the incorrigible.

Susan Sontag

Quote Topics

Acknowledge Against Answer Atrocious Contemplation Different Existence Images Incorrigible Make More Needs Numb Objects Oneself Several Steel Weakness

Quote Author

Susan Sontag
American - Author
January 16, 1933 - December 28, 2004

Religion promotes the divine discontent within oneself, so that one tries to make oneself a better person and draw oneself closer to God.

Cyril Cusack

To make images is a way of ordering one's world, of exploring and understanding one's relationship to existence. ... The images we make are often ahead of our understanding, but to say "yes" to a subject is also to have recognized, however dimly, a part of oneself; to live with that image, to accept its significance is perhaps to grow in understanding.

John Blakemore

Against the suffering which may come upon one from human relationships the readiest safeguard is voluntary isolation, keeping oneself aloof from other people. The happiness which can be achieved along this path is, as we see, the happiness of quietness. Against the dreaded external world one can only defend oneself by some kind of turning away from it, if one intends to solve the task by oneself.

Sigmund Freud

To make oneself hated is more difficult than to make oneself loved.

Pablo Picasso

In any triangle, who is the betrayer, who the unseen rival, and who the humiliated lover? Oneself, oneself, and no one but oneself!

Erica Jong

To be oneself, simply oneself, is so amazing and utterly unique an experience that it's hard to convince oneself so singular a thing happens to everybody.

Simone de Beauvoir

To begin with oneself but not to end with onself. To start from oneself but not to aim at oneself.

Martin Buber

Marriage is not comfortable and harmonious. Rather it is a place of individuation where a person rubs up against oneself and against the partner, bumps up against the person in love and in rejection, and in this fashion learns to know oneself, the world, good and evil, the heights and the depths.

Adolph Guggenbuhl-Craig

To be rich is to give; to give nothing is to be poor; to live is to love; to love nothing is to be dead; to be happy is to devote oneself; to exist only for oneself is to damn oneself, and to exile oneself to hell.

Eliphas Levi

It is not only useless, it is harmful, to believe in oneself until one truly knows oneself. And to know oneself means to accept our moments of insanity, of eccentricity, of childishness and blindness.

Sydney J. Harris

Photography means releasing oneself from one type of gravity and placing oneself in a space where a different force is trying to move you.

Shomei Tomatsu

What is magic? In the deepest sense, magic is an experience. It's the experience of finding oneself alive within a world that is itself alive. It is the experience of contact and communication between oneself and something that is profoundly different from oneself: a swallow, a frog, a spider weaving its web.

David Abram

To remember oneself means the same thing as to be aware of oneself - I am. It is not a function, not thinking, not feeling; it is a different state of consciousness.

P.D. Ouspensky

Early on, I learnt from the Russian intelligentsia that the only meaning of life lies in conscious participation in the making of history. The more I think of that, the more deeply true it seems to be. It follows that one must range oneself actively against everything that diminishes man, and involve oneself in all struggles which tend to liberate and enlarge him. This categorical imperative is by no way lessened by the fact that such an involvement is inevitably soiled by error: it is a worse error merely to live for oneself, caught within traditions which are soiled by inhumanity.

Victor Serge

Studying the Buddha way is studying oneself. Studying oneself is forgetting oneself. Forgetting oneself is being enlightened by all things. Being enlightened by all things is to shed the body-mind of oneself, and those of others. No trace of enlightenment remains, and this traceless enlightenment continues endlessly.