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
Lying is the most simple form of self-defence.
Interpretation
Lying serves as an easy way for individuals to protect themselves from truth or vulnerability.
This quote by Susan Sontag suggests that people often resort to lying as a basic instinct to shield themselves from harm or to avoid uncomfortable truths. Instead of facing difficult situations or acknowledging their real feelings, individuals might find solace in deception as a defense mechanism, implementing it as a means of self-preservation in interpersonal interactions.
In practice
During a discussion about honesty in relationships, this quote could illustrate the temptation to avoid the truth.
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.
Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art.
Gide and I have attained such perfect intellectual communion that I experience the appropriate labor pains for every thought he gives birth to!
Volume depends precisely on the writer's having been able to sit in a room every day, year after year, alone.
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.
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.
Bureaucracy defends the status quo long past the time when the quo has lost its status.
Human life and objects and trees vibrate with mysterious meanings, which can be deciphered like cuneiform writing. There exists a meaning, hidden from day to day, but accessible in moments of greatest attentiveness, in those moments when consciousness loves the world.
If psychedelics are exopheromones that dissolve the dominant ego, then they are also enzymes that synergize the human imagination and empower language. They cause us to connect and reconnect the contents of the collective mind in ever more implausible, beautiful, and self-fulfilling ways.
Let no one delay the study of philosophy while young nor weary of it when old.
That's one of the greatest curses ever inflicted on the human race, memory.
. . . the mind is desperate to fix the river {of events} in place: Possessed by ideas of the past, preoccupied with images of the future, it overlooks the plain truth of the moment.
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