Top 450 Susan Sontag Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “Paintings invariably sum up; photographs usually do not. Photographic images are pieces of evidence in an ongoing biography or history. And one photograph, unlike one painting, implies that there will be others.”

— Susan Sontag

252. “Ideas disturb the levelness of life.”

— Susan Sontag

253. “Decline of the letter, the rise of the notebook! One doesn’t write to others any more; one writes to oneself.”

— Susan Sontag

254. “Ours is an age which consciously pursues health, and yet only believes in the reality of sickness.”

— Susan Sontag

255. “Despite the illusion of giving understanding, what seeing through photographs really invites is an acquisitive relation to the world that nourishes aesthetic awareness and promotes emotional detachment.”

— Susan Sontag

256. “Time eventually positions most photographs, even the most amateurish, at the level of art.”

— Susan Sontag

257. “Philosophy is an art form – art of thought or thought as art.”

— Susan Sontag

258. “In the United States it’s not important which religion you adhere to, as long as you have one.”

— Susan Sontag

259. “I am tired of being a person. Not just tired of being the person I was, but any person at all. I like watching people, but I don’t like talking to them, dealing with them, pleasing them, or offending them. I am tired.”

— Susan Sontag

260. “It is not suffering as such that is most deeply feared but suffering that degrades.”

— Susan Sontag

261. “Finally, the most grandiose result of the photographic enterprise is to give us the sense that we can hold the whole world in our heads – as an anthology of images. To collect photographs is to collect the world.”

— Susan Sontag

262. “The particular qualities and intentions of photographs tend to be swallowed up in the generalized pathos of time past.”

— Susan Sontag

263. “The unit of the poet is the word, the unit of the prose writer is the sentence.”

— Susan Sontag

264. “Passion paralyzes good taste.”

— Susan Sontag

265. “There is a terrible, mean American resentment toward a writer who tries to do many things.”

— Susan Sontag

266. “Images are more real than anyone could have supposed.”

— Susan Sontag

267. “Taste has no system and no proofs.”

— Susan Sontag

268. “In the twentieth century, the repellent, harrowing disease that is made the index of a superior sensitivity, the vehicle of “spiritual” feelings and “critical” discontent, is insanity.”

— Susan Sontag

269. “I want to live as long as possible, just to see how stupid it gets.”

— Susan Sontag

270. “Ours is a society in which secrets of private life that, formerly, you would have given nearly anything to conceal, you now clamor to get on a television show to reveal.”

— Susan Sontag

271. “The fact that illness is associated with the poor – who are, from the perspective of the privileged, aliens in one’s midst – reinforces the association of illness with the foreign with an exotic, often primitive place.”

— Susan Sontag

272. “Photographs are perhaps the most mysterious of all the objects that make up, and thicken, the environment we recognize as modern. Photographs really are experience captured, and the camera is the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mood.”

— Susan Sontag

273. “With more people, there are more voices to tune out.”

— Susan Sontag

274. “As one passion begins to fail it is necessary to form another, for the whole art of going through life tolerably is to keep oneself eager about anything.”

— Susan Sontag

275. “None of us can ever retrieve that innocence before all theory when art knew no need to justify itself, when one did not ask of a work of art what it said because one knew what it did. From now to the end of consciousness, we are stuck with the task of defending art.”

— Susan Sontag

276. “The highest vocation of photography is to explain man to man.”

— Susan Sontag

277. “The idea of content in art is today merely a hindrance, a nuisance, a subtle or not so subtle philistinism.”

— Susan Sontag

278. “She felt herself needing more and more sleep. When she awoke in the morning, she thought of when she might lie down again – and when she would sleep. She started going to the movies.”

— Susan Sontag

279. “Books are not only the arbitrary sum of our dreams, and our memory. They also give us the model of self-transcende nce.”

— Susan Sontag

280. “What is odd is not that so many of the iconic news photos of the past, including some of the best-remembered pictures from the Second World War, appear to have been staged. It is that we are surprised to learn they were staged and always disappointed.”

— Susan Sontag

281. “Anything in history or nature that can be described as changing steadily can be seen as heading toward catastrophe.”

— Susan Sontag

282. “My emotional life: dialectic between craving for privacy and need to submerge myself in a passionate relationship to another. With him I have neither, neither privacy or passion. Neither the heightening of self which is won by privacy and loneliness, nor the splendid heroic beautiful loss of self that accompanies passion.”

— Susan Sontag

283. “But maybe they were barbarians. Maybe this is what most barbarians look like. They look like everybody else.”

— Susan Sontag

284. “When something is just bad, it’s often because it is too mediocre in its ambition. The artist hasn’t attempted to do anything really outlandish.”

— Susan Sontag

285. “The photograph is like a quotation, or a maxim or proverb. Each of us mentally stocks hundreds of photographs, subject to instant recall.”

— Susan Sontag

286. “Any disease that is treated as a mystery and acutely enough feared will be felt to be morally, if not literally, contagious.”

— Susan Sontag

287. “I am thinking – talking – in images. I don’t know how to write them down. Every feeling is physical.”

— Susan Sontag

288. “If tragedy is an experience of hyperinvolvement, comedy is an experience of underinvolvement, of detachment.”

— Susan Sontag

289. “Gide and I have attained such perfect intellectual communion that I experience the appropriate labor pains for every thought he gives birth to!”

— Susan Sontag

290. “In photographing dwarfs, you don’t get majesty and beauty. You get dwarfs.”

— Susan Sontag

291. “Look, what I want is to be fully present in my life – to be really where you are, contemporary with yourself in your life, giving full attention to the world, which includes you. You are not the world, the world is not identical to you, but you’re in it and paying attention to it. That’s what a writer does – a writer pays attention to the world.”

— Susan Sontag

292. “What we need is to use what we have.”

— Susan Sontag

293. “It is the nature of aphoristic thinking to be always in a state of concluding; a bid to have the final word is inherent in all powerful phrase-making.”

— Susan Sontag

294. “How boring just to be a body.”

— Susan Sontag

295. “The felt unreliability of human experience brought about by the inhuman acceleration of historical change has led every sensitive modern mind to the recording of some kind of nausea, of intellectual vertigo.”

— Susan Sontag

296. “In contrast to the written account-which, depending on its complexity of thought, reference, and vocabulary, is pitched at a larger or smaller readership-a photograph has only one language and is destined potentially for all.”

— Susan Sontag

297. “Each generation has to reinvent spirituality.”

— Susan Sontag

298. “Instead of expecting all and being lowered into despair each time I get less, I expect nothing now and, occasionally, I get a little, and am more than a little happy.”

— Susan Sontag

299. “AIDS occupies such a large part in our awareness because of what it has been taken to represent. It seems the very model of all the catastrophes privileged populations feel await them.”

— Susan Sontag

300. “It is intolerable to have one’s sufferings twinned with anybody else’s.”

— Susan Sontag