Life & Wisdom Quote by Susan Sontag

Sontag twists a familiar moral geometry: truth as a single, shining point opposed to the lie. Instead she redraws it as posture. “The truth is balance” suggests something achieved, calibrated, held in tension - not merely discovered. Truth, in this frame, is less a fact than a practiced alignment between competing claims, perceptions, and desires. It’s an aesthetic and ethical stance: a refusal to collapse complexity into a slogan.

The second sentence is the sly blade. “Unbalance” is named as truth’s opposite, but Sontag refuses the comforting symmetry that would make imbalance automatically dishonest. You can be off-kilter without being fraudulent. You can be partial, overheated, one-eyed, or premature - and still not be “lying.” That distinction matters because modern arguments often treat any distortion as a moral crime. Sontag is diagnosing a culture that confuses error, obsession, and propaganda, flattening them into the same sin.

The subtext is also autobiographical in the Sontag way: a lifelong suspicion of easy certainties, whether in politics, art criticism, or our appetite for moral clarity. Her essays repeatedly warn that intensity can curdle into righteousness, and righteousness into brutality. Calling imbalance “not a lie” is a defense of the messy human conditions that produce skewed accounts: trauma, love, outrage, limited vantage points. It’s also a warning: the most dangerous untruths may be those that don’t technically qualify as lies - narratives built from real fragments, arranged without balance, weaponized by selection rather than invention.

Truth, for Sontag, isn’t purity. It’s proportion.