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.
More Quotes from Susan Sontag:
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.Susan Sontag
The freakish is no longer a private zone, difficult of access. People who are bizarre, in sexual disgrace, emotionally violent are seen daily on the newsstands, on TV, in the subways.
Susan Sontag
The standard that a society should actually embody its own professed principles is a utopian one, in the sense that moral principles contradict the way things really are --- and always will be. How things really are --- and always will be --- is neither all-evil nor all-good but deficient, inconsistent, inferior. Principles invite us to do something about the morass of contradictions in which we function morally. Principles invite us to clean up our act to become intolerant of moral laxity and compromise and cowardice and the turning away from what is upsetting that secret gnawing of the heart that tells us that what we are doing is not right, and so counsels us that we'd be better off just not thinking about it.
Susan Sontag
Life is not significant details, illuminated by a flash, fixed forever. Photographs are.
Susan Sontag
Of course the movies are going to be the more visible, more high profile, for the simple reason that a lot more money is involved and this is a largely money-oriented society. ... Nevertheless, this is a very good book town, whether it's known to be that or not, and that's why you have something like this.
Susan Sontag
The truth is that Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Marx, and Balanchine ballets don't redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world.
Susan Sontag
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Based on Topics: Art Quotes, Beauty Quotes, Morality QuotesBased on Keywords: perishable, untimeliness
As for death one gets used to it, even if it's only other people's death you get used to.
Enid Bagnold
Otherwise we get off the track and we do not fulfil the historical role which we want to fulfil: to help the masses, the exploited and the oppressed of the world, build a classless society, a world socialist federation.
Ernest Mandel
Fatigue is the best pillow.
Benjamin Franklin