Top 500 Saul Bellow Quotes (2026 Update)
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451. “M-machinery’ll make an ocean of commodities. Dictators can’t stop it. Man will accept death. Live without God. That’s a b-brave project. End of an illusion. But with what values instead?”

— Saul Bellow

452. “Because you’re a highbrow and married a highbrow broad. Somewhere in every intellectual is a dumb prick. You guys can’t answer your own questions –.”

— Saul Bellow

453. “But how we love looking fine in the eyes of the world – how beautiful are the old when they are doing a snow job!”

— Saul Bellow

454. “Wait a minute, though: Sammler denied himself the privilege of the high-principled intellectual who must always be applying the purest standards and thumping the rest of his species on the head. When he tried to imagine a just social order, he could not do it. A non-corrupt society? He could not do that either. There were no revolutions that he could remember which had not been made for justice, freedom, and pure goodness. Their last state was always more nihilistic than the first.”

— Saul Bellow

455. “Dear Doktor Professor Heidegger, I should like to know what you mean by the expression “the fall into the quotidian.” When did this fall occur? Where were we standing when it happened?”

— Saul Bellow

456. “Rubin, the man at the newsstand, had poor eyes. They may not have been actually weak but they were poor in expression, with lacy lids that furled down at the corners.”

— Saul Bellow

457. “In the language of evolutionary theory Bryan was a dead branch of the life-tree.”

— Saul Bellow

458. “Certain expressions burn people up, and especially the expression of wisdom, which can lead you straight to the loony bin. You will have earned it!”

— Saul Bellow

459. “It was the middle-class female solidarity, defending a nice girl from charges of calculation and viciousness. Nice girls marry for love. But should they fall out of love, they must be free to love another. No decent husband will oppose the heart.”

— Saul Bellow

460. “Didn’t Margaret know that he was nearly at the end of his rope? Of course. Her instinct told her that this was her opportunity, and she was giving him the works.”

— Saul Bellow

461. “I may be old enough for my second childhood, but at least the first is well behind me.”

— Saul Bellow

462. “No life so barren and subordinate that it didn’t have imaginary dignities, honors to come, freedom to advance.”

— Saul Bellow

463. “For to be fully conscious of oneself as an individual is also to be separated from all else.”

— Saul Bellow

464. “Is it an easier farewell for Dad if we don’t part friends?”

— Saul Bellow

465. “She has two husbands. Whose are the kids? The fellow detected her and she gave a signed confession that two of the four children were not the father’s.”

— Saul Bellow

466. “Gratitude! I was deeply grateful. But the politic gratitude of weakness, of the sufferer, furious underneath.”

— Saul Bellow

467. “It seemed necessary for him to lift one shoulder in order to put his hand into his jacket pocket.”

— Saul Bellow

468. “She liked to give the example of Whistler the painter when he was taken to task by a woman who said, “I never see trees like that.” He told her, “No, ma’am, but don’t you wish you could?” This could be a variation on “Ye have eyes and see not,” an aesthete’s version of it.”

— Saul Bellow

469. “Can’t dump the sonofabitch, can we? Terrible handicap, a soul.”

— Saul Bellow

470. “It is better to die what you are than to live a stranger forever.”

— Saul Bellow

471. “He turned out to be right. Grielescu had attached himself to the Nazis, not to the milder, Italian form of fascism.”

— Saul Bellow

472. “He tried to make his lust comical, to show how absurd it all was, easily the most wretched form of human struggle, the very essence of slavery.”

— Saul Bellow

473. “But the Jews feel that the world was created for each and every one of us, and when you destroy a human life you destroy an entire world – the world as it existed for that person.”

— Saul Bellow

474. “Never has any country given its people so many toys to play with or sent such highly gifted individuals to the remotest corners of idleness, as close as possible to the frontiers of pain.”

— Saul Bellow

475. “I got a lawyer, and she got one, too, and both of them talk and send me bills, and I eat my heart out.”

— Saul Bellow

476. “An old man, disappointed, of failing strength, may try to reinvigorate himself by means of anger.”

— Saul Bellow

477. “But you find people who have their luck and take the credit for it, too – all brains and personality, when all that happened was that they were handed a bucket when it rained.”

— Saul Bellow

478. “But a man doesn’t need happiness for himself. No, he can put up with any amount of torment – with recollections, with his own familiar evils, despair. And this is the unwritten history of man, his unseen, negative accomplishment, his power to do without gratification for himself provided there is something great, something into which his being, and all beings, can go. He does not need meaning as long as such intensity has scope. Because then it is self-evident; it is meaning.”

— Saul Bellow

479. “Pretpostavimo da sam ja apsolutno u pravu a da monsignor, na primjer, ima potpuno krivo. Ako sam ja u pravu, problem suvislosti svijeta, i sva odgovornost za nju, postaju moji.”

— Saul Bellow

480. “He was a splendid old man, only partly fraudulent, and what more can you ask of anyone?”

— Saul Bellow

481. “Slavery has never really been abolished. More people are enslaved to different things than you can shake a stick at.”

— Saul Bellow

482. “As if death had tried her with his teeth and found her still unripe.”

— Saul Bellow

483. “He was looking for the Knight of Faith, the real prodigy. That real prodigy, having set its relations with the infinite, was entirely at home in the finite. Able to carry the jewel of faith, making the motions of the infinite, and as a result needing nothing but the finite and the usual. Whereas others sought the extraordinary in the world. Or wished to be what was gaped at.”

— Saul Bellow

484. “They did not know how much he cared for them. No. It hurt him greatly and he blamed Margaret for turning them against him. She wanted to ruin him, while she wore the mask of kindness.”

— Saul Bellow

485. “Free personalities getting no help from either deaf heaven or neutral earth were facing mortally dangerous choices which would determine the future of civilization.”

— Saul Bellow

486. “The only truly interesting side of the matter was the intimate design of the injury, the fact that it was so penetrating, custom-made exactly to your measure. It’s fascinating that hatred should be so personal as to be almost loving. The knife and the wound aching for each other. Much of course depends upon the vulnerability of the intended. Some cry out, and some swallow the thrust in silence. About the latter you could write the inner history of mankind.”

— Saul Bellow

487. “She was a bathing beauty – short, the usual breasts, hips, and smooth thighs.”

— Saul Bellow

488. “But I have had visions of judgment. I see mainly the obstinacy of cripples. We do not love ourselves, but persist in stubbornness. Each man is stubbornly, stubbornly himself.”

— Saul Bellow

489. “I know that I don’t have to be next year what I was last year. I’ve been at one end and I can get to the other. There’s no limit to what I can be. And even if I should miss being so dazzling, I know the idea of it is genuine.”

— Saul Bellow

490. “No, the truth must be something we understand at once, without an introduction or explanation, but so common and familiar that we don’t always realize it’s around us.”

— Saul Bellow

491. “In full tumult the great afternoon current raced for Columbus Circle, where the mouth of midtown stood open and the skyscrapers gave back the yellow fire of the sun.”

— Saul Bellow

492. “Goethe once stated that anyone who merely increased his knowledge without at the same time showing himself what to do with it poisoned his life.”

— Saul Bellow

493. “The strength of a man’s virtue or spiritual capacity measured by his ordinary life.”

— Saul Bellow

494. “For knowledge of death makes us wish to extend our lives at the expense of others. And this is the root of the struggle for power.”

— Saul Bellow

495. “To God he jotted several lines. How my mind has struggled to make coherent sense. I have not been too good at it. But have desired to do your unknowable will, taking it, and you, without symbols. Everything of intensest significance. Especially if divested of me.”

— Saul Bellow

496. “Man is a creature who has something to say about everything under the sun.”

— Saul Bellow

497. “But what about justice? – Justice! Look who wants justice! Most of mankind has lived and died without – totally without it. People by the billions and for ages sweated, gypped, enslaved, suffocated, bled to death, buried with no more justice than cattle.”

— Saul Bellow

498. “I felt singularly ashamed of not being a doctor.”

— Saul Bellow

499. “The elderly ladies were rouged and mascaraed and hennaed and used blue hair rinse and eye shadow and wore costume jewelry, and many of them were proud and stared at you with expressions that did not belong to their age.”

— Saul Bellow

500. “And what about all the good I have in my heart – doesn’t it mean anything? Is it simply a joke? A false hope that makes a man feel the illusion of worth? And so he goes on with his struggles. But this good is no phony. I know it isn’t. I swear it. Again, he was greatly excited.”

— Saul Bellow