The becoming of man is the history of the exhaustion of his possibilities.
Meaning of the quote
The quote means that as people grow and develop, they gradually use up the different things they are capable of doing or becoming. Our lives are a story of exploring and using up the many possibilities we have within us. As we grow older, we eventually reach the limits of what we can do or be.
About Susan Sontag
Susan Sontag was a renowned American writer, critic, and public intellectual. She was known for her influential essays on topics like art, photography, and war, as well as her fictional works. Sontag was a prominent voice in various social and political movements, and her writings have been praised as being among the most impactful of her generation.
More quotes from Susan Sontag
For those who live neither with religious consolations about death nor with a sense of death (or of anything else) as natural, death is the obscene mystery, the ultimate affront, the thing that cannot be controlled. It can only be denied.
American writer and filmmaker, professor, and activist (1933-2004)
A fiction about soft or easy deaths is part of the mythology of most diseases that are not considered shameful or demeaning.
American writer and filmmaker, professor, and activist (1933-2004)
The love of the famous, like all strong passions, is quite abstract. Its intensity can be measured mathematically, and it is independent of persons.
American writer and filmmaker, professor, and activist (1933-2004)
Pornography is a theatre of types, never of individuals.
American writer and filmmaker, professor, and activist (1933-2004)
AIDS obliges people to think of sex as having, possibly, the direst consequences: suicide. Or murder.
American writer and filmmaker, professor, and activist (1933-2004)
I do not think white America is committed to granting equality to the American Negro. This is a passionately racist country; it will continue to be so in the foreseeable future.
American writer and filmmaker, professor, and activist (1933-2004)
Life is not significant details, illuminated by a flash, fixed forever. Photographs are.
American writer and filmmaker, professor, and activist (1933-2004)
In America, the photographer is not simply the person who records the past, but the one who invents it.
American writer and filmmaker, professor, and activist (1933-2004)
Silence remains, inescapably, a form of speech.
American writer and filmmaker, professor, and activist (1933-2004)
The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.
American writer and filmmaker, professor, and activist (1933-2004)
Ambition, if it feeds at all, does so on the ambition of others.
American writer and filmmaker, professor, and activist (1933-2004)
What we need is to use what we have.
American writer and filmmaker, professor, and activist (1933-2004)
Mallarme said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything exists to end in a photograph.
American writer and filmmaker, professor, and activist (1933-2004)
Volume depends precisely on the writer’s having been able to sit in a room every day, year after year, alone.
American writer and filmmaker, professor, and activist (1933-2004)
Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs.
American writer and filmmaker, professor, and activist (1933-2004)
Intelligence is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas.
American writer and filmmaker, professor, and activist (1933-2004)
My idea of a writer: someone interested in everything.
American writer and filmmaker, professor, and activist (1933-2004)
So successful has been the camera’s role in beautifying the world that photographs, rather than the world, have become the standard of the beautiful.
American writer and filmmaker, professor, and activist (1933-2004)
The ideology of capitalism makes us all into connoisseurs of liberty – of the indefinite expansion of possibility.
American writer and filmmaker, professor, and activist (1933-2004)
The taste for quotations (and for the juxtaposition of incongruous quotations) is a Surrealist taste.
American writer and filmmaker, professor, and activist (1933-2004)
What is the most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.
American writer and filmmaker, professor, and activist (1933-2004)
It is not suffering as such that is most deeply feared but suffering that degrades.
American writer and filmmaker, professor, and activist (1933-2004)
The past itself, as historical change continues to accelerate, has become the most surreal of subjects – making it possible… to see a new beauty in what is vanishing.
American writer and filmmaker, professor, and activist (1933-2004)
Any critic is entitled to wrong judgments, of course. But certain lapses of judgment indicate the radical failure of an entire sensibility.
American writer and filmmaker, professor, and activist (1933-2004)
Anything in history or nature that can be described as changing steadily can be seen as heading toward catastrophe.
American writer and filmmaker, professor, and activist (1933-2004)
Any important disease whose causality is murky, and for which treatment is ineffectual, tends to be awash in significance.
American writer and filmmaker, professor, and activist (1933-2004)
Existence is no more than the precarious attainment of relevance in an intensely mobile flux of past, present, and future.
American writer and filmmaker, professor, and activist (1933-2004)
The life of the creative man is lead, directed and controlled by boredom. Avoiding boredom is one of our most important purposes.
American writer and filmmaker, professor, and activist (1933-2004)
I don’t want to express alienation. It isn’t what I feel. I’m interested in various kinds of passionate engagement. All my work says be serious, be passionate, wake up.
American writer and filmmaker, professor, and activist (1933-2004)
To photograph is to confer importance.
American writer and filmmaker, professor, and activist (1933-2004)
What is most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.
American writer and filmmaker, professor, and activist (1933-2004)
I was not looking for my dreams to interpret my life, but rather for my life to interpret my dreams.
American writer and filmmaker, professor, and activist (1933-2004)
Societies need to have one illness which becomes identified with evil, and attaches blame to its victims.
American writer and filmmaker, professor, and activist (1933-2004)
The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people’s reality, and eventually in one’s own.
American writer and filmmaker, professor, and activist (1933-2004)
Books are funny little portable pieces of thought.
American writer and filmmaker, professor, and activist (1933-2004)
Lying is an elementary means of self-defense.
American writer and filmmaker, professor, and activist (1933-2004)
The truth is always something that is told, not something that is known. If there were no speaking or writing, there would be no truth about anything. There would only be what is.
American writer and filmmaker, professor, and activist (1933-2004)
In the final analysis, style is art. And art is nothing more or less than various modes of stylized, dehumanized representation.
American writer and filmmaker, professor, and activist (1933-2004)
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.
American writer and filmmaker, professor, and activist (1933-2004)
What pornography is really about, ultimately, isn’t sex but death.
American writer and filmmaker, professor, and activist (1933-2004)
The only interesting answers are those that destroy the questions.
American writer and filmmaker, professor, and activist (1933-2004)
It is not altogether wrong to say that there is no such thing as a bad photograph – only less interesting, less relevant, less mysterious ones.
American writer and filmmaker, professor, and activist (1933-2004)
As photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal, they also help people to take possession of space in which they are insecure.
American writer and filmmaker, professor, and activist (1933-2004)
The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art – and, by analogy, our own experience – more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.
American writer and filmmaker, professor, and activist (1933-2004)
Although none of the rules for becoming more alive is valid, it is healthy to keep on formulating them.
American writer and filmmaker, professor, and activist (1933-2004)
“Camp” is a vision of the world in terms of style – but a particular style. It is the love of the exaggerated.
American writer and filmmaker, professor, and activist (1933-2004)
The becoming of man is the history of the exhaustion of his possibilities.
American writer and filmmaker, professor, and activist (1933-2004)
The truth is balance. However the opposite of truth, which is unbalance, may not be a lie.
American writer and filmmaker, professor, and activist (1933-2004)
Authoritarian political ideologies have a vested interest in promoting fear, a sense of the imminence of takeover by aliens and real diseases are useful material.
American writer and filmmaker, professor, and activist (1933-2004)
Most people in this society who aren’t actively mad are, at best, reformed or potential lunatics.
American writer and filmmaker, professor, and activist (1933-2004)
A family’s photograph album is generally about the extended family and, often, is all that remains of it.
American writer and filmmaker, professor, and activist (1933-2004)
Sanity is a cozy lie.
American writer and filmmaker, professor, and activist (1933-2004)
It is not the position, but the disposition.
American writer and filmmaker, professor, and activist (1933-2004)
Lying is the most simple form of self-defence.
American writer and filmmaker, professor, and activist (1933-2004)
Depression is melancholy minus its charms – the animation, the fits.
American writer and filmmaker, professor, and activist (1933-2004)
I envy paranoids; they actually feel people are paying attention to them.
American writer and filmmaker, professor, and activist (1933-2004)
Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art.
American writer and filmmaker, professor, and activist (1933-2004)
Victims suggest innocence. And innocence, by the inexorable logic that governs all relational terms, suggests guilt.
American writer and filmmaker, professor, and activist (1933-2004)
Making social comment is an artificial place for an artist to start from. If an artist is touched by some social condition, what the artist creates will reflect that, but you can’t force it.
American writer and filmmaker, professor, and activist (1933-2004)
The problems of this world are only truly solved in two ways: by extinction or duplication.
American writer and filmmaker, professor, and activist (1933-2004)
To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.
American writer and filmmaker, professor, and activist (1933-2004)
Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art.
American writer and filmmaker, professor, and activist (1933-2004)
Surrealism is a bourgeois disaffection; that its militants thought it universal is only one of the signs that it is typically bourgeois.
American writer and filmmaker, professor, and activist (1933-2004)