Susan Sontag Quotes

My life is existing. Cinema is certainly not my life

For me, the magazine was always the heart of what my life was all about, and the other half was living the life.

My trade and art is to live.

I also believe that writing becomes worthwhile and vitalized only through a full and exciting life.

Sometimes it takes the better part of a lifetime to find out what your passion is, but in my observation, if you do, it might be the best part of your life.

Life without emotions is like an engine without fuel.

Looking at your life as a debt may seem the dreariest view of things at a distance; but it cannot really be so. What makes life dreary is the want of motive; but once beginning to act with the penitential, loving purpose you have in your mind, there will be unexpected satisfactions--there will be newly-opening needs--continually coming to carry you on from day to day. You will find your life growing like a plant.

The key that unlocks energy is desire. It's also the key to a long and interesting life. If we expect to create any drive, any real force within ourselves, we have to get excited.

I believe in the possibility of happiness, if one cultivates intuition and outlives the grosser passions, including optimism.

A life well lived is the most exquisite work of art.

They who have no central purpose in their life fall an easy prey to petty worries, fears, troubles, and self-pitying, all of which are indications of weakness, which lead, just as surely as deliberately planned sins (though by a different route), to failure, unhappiness, and loss, for weakness cannot persist in a power evolving universe.

Look, there's nothing wrong with people being happy, but there's more to life than turning on and screwing to Ravel's Bolero.

If you don't invest your life in what you really care for, your life will be wasted. You will not fly - you will just drag yourself through life.

It isn't success after all, is it, if it isn't an expression of your deepest energies?

Anyone who has known happiness will never again be able humbly to accept sadness.

Most people didn't pursue their passions simply because of the promise of a paycheck. They pursued them because they couldn't imagine doing anything else with their lives.

Nature in causing reason and the passions to be born at one and the same time apparently wished by the latter gift to distract man from the evil she had done him by the former, and by only permitting him to live for a few years after the loss of his passions seems to show her pity by early deliverance from a life that reduces him to reason as his sole resource.

Follow the voice of your heart, even if it leads you off the path of timid souls. Do not become hard and embittered, even if life tortures you at times. There is only one thing that counts: to live one's life well and happily.

If a man can reach the latter days of his life with his soul intact, he has mastered life.

Being a mother has made my life complete.

Don't get so busy making a living that you forget to make a life.

Life has a much bigger plan for you. Happiness is part of that plan. Health is part of that plan. Stability is part of that plan. Constant struggle is not.

Work for the things that you care about.

Respond to every call that excites your spirit.

To dance is to live. What I want is a school of life.