Top 450 Susan Sontag Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I haven’t been everywhere, but it’s on my list.”

— Susan Sontag

Featured in: Encouraging Quotes, Travel Quotes

2. “A thing is a thing, not what is said of that thing.”

— Susan Sontag

3. “Translation is the circulatory system of the world’s literatures.”

— Susan Sontag

4. “Do stuff. be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration’s shove or society’s kiss on your forehead. Pay attention. It’s all about paying attention. attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. stay eager.”

— Susan Sontag

5. “Life is a movie; death is a photograph.”

— Susan Sontag

6. “Kindness, kindness, kindness. I want to make a New Year’s prayer, not a resolution. I’m praying for courage.”

— Susan Sontag

Featured in: New Year Quotes

7. “A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world.”

— Susan Sontag

8. “My library is an archive of longings.”

— Susan Sontag

Featured in: Reading Quotes

9. “Everything has changed and nothing is changed.”

— Susan Sontag

10. “Sanity is a cozy lie.”

— Susan Sontag

Featured in: Depression Quotes

11. “Intelligence is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas.”

— Susan Sontag

Featured in: Intelligence Quotes

12. “In the valley of sorrow, spread your wings.”

— Susan Sontag

Featured in: Sadness Quotes

13. “The white race is the cancer of human history.”

— Susan Sontag

14. “I’m only interested in people engaged in a project of self-transformation.”

— Susan Sontag

15. “What makes me feel strong? Being in love and work. I must work.”

— Susan Sontag

Featured in: Strong Quotes

16. “Love words, agonize over sentences. And pay attention to the world.”

— Susan Sontag

17. “What is the most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.”

— Susan Sontag

18. “In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.”

— Susan Sontag

19. “Lying is an elementary means of self-defense.”

— Susan Sontag

20. “Today everything exists to end in a photograph.”

— Susan Sontag

21. “Art is a form of consciousness.”

— Susan Sontag

22. “10 percent of any population is cruel, no matter what, and 10 percent is merciful, no matter what, and the remaining 80 percent can be moved in either direction.”

— Susan Sontag

23. “Depression is melancholy minus its charms – the animation, the fits.”

— Susan Sontag

24. “I must change my life so that I can live it, not wait for it.”

— Susan Sontag

25. “Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick.”

— Susan Sontag

26. “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

27. “This is the beauty that emerges from self-confidence, class confidence. That says, I am not born to please. I am born to be pleased.”

— Susan Sontag

28. “A good book is an education of the heart. It enlarges your sense of human possibility what human nature is of what happens in the world. It’s a creator of inwardness.”

— Susan Sontag

29. “The basic unit for contemporary art is not the idea, but the analysis of and extension of sensations.”

— Susan Sontag

30. “It is easier to endure than to change. But once one has changed, what was endured is hard to recall.”

— Susan Sontag

31. “The only interesting answers are those that destroy the questions.”

— Susan Sontag

32. “Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager.”

— Susan Sontag

33. “Fear binds people together. And fear disperses them. Courage inspires communities: the courage of an example – for courage is as contagious as fear. But courage, certain kinds of courage, can also isolate the brave.”

— Susan Sontag

34. “The most potent elements in a work of art are, often, its silences.”

— Susan Sontag

35. “Photographs furnish evidence. Something we hear about, but doubt, seems proven when we’re shown a photograph of it.”

— Susan Sontag

36. “Love dies because its birth was an error.”

— Susan Sontag

37. “Being in love means being willing to ruin yourself for the other person.”

— Susan Sontag

38. “The whole point of Camp is to dethrone the serious. Camp is playful, anti-serious. More precisely, Camp involves a new, more complex relation to “the serious.” One can be serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious.”

— Susan Sontag

39. “All understanding begins with our not accepting the world as it appears.”

— Susan Sontag

40. “I believe that courage is morally neutral. I can well imagine wicked people being brave and good people being timid or afraid. I don’t consider it a moral virtue.”

— Susan Sontag

41. “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.”

— Susan Sontag

42. “The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.”

— Susan Sontag

43. “It is not the position, but the disposition.”

— Susan Sontag

44. “In the journal I do not just express myself more openly than I could to any person; I create myself.”

— Susan Sontag

45. “Writing is a little door. Some fantasies, like big pieces of furniture, won’t come through.”

— Susan Sontag

46. “Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Balanchine ballets, et al. don’t redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history.”

— Susan Sontag

47. “Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted. Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution.”

— Susan Sontag

48. “I don’t write because there’s an audience. I write because there is literature.”

— Susan Sontag

49. “It’s a pleasure to share one’s memories. Everything remembered is dear, endearing, touching, precious. At least the past is safe though we didn’t know it at the time. We know it now. Because it’s in the past; because we have survived.”

— Susan Sontag

50. “Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers.”

— Susan Sontag