Top 450 Saul Bellow Quotes (2026 Update)
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451. “He was an extremely correct person except that he never shaved in the morning, not caring, probably, how he looked to the fumblers and the old people and the operators and the gamblers and the idlers of Broadway uptown.”

— Saul Bellow

452. “He said, repeating the opinion of Socrates in the Phaedrus, that a tree, so beautiful to look at, never spoke a word and that conversation was possible only in the city, between men.”

— Saul Bellow

453. “Without teaching, Jewry was an impossibility.”

— Saul Bellow

454. “You’re very sympathetic, even the young girls feel that. You’d make a good provider. But they go more for the other types.”

— Saul Bellow

455. “The human being, more and more oppressed by the peculiar terms of his existence – one time around for each, no more than a single life per customer – has to think of the boredom of death. O those eternities of nonexistence! For people who crave continual interest and diversity, O! how boring death will be! To live in the grave, in one place, how frightful!”

— Saul Bellow

456. “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

457. “Cynicism was bread and meat to everyone. And irony, too. Maybe it couldn’t be helped. It was probably even necessary.”

— Saul Bellow

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

— Saul Bellow

459. “But at least one thing became clear. To look for fulfillment in another, in interpersonal relationships, was a feminine game.”

— Saul Bellow

460. “But such vexations always filled me with energy as well. And if I later became such a formidable mass of credentials it was because I put such slights to good use. I avenged myself by making progress.”

— Saul Bellow

461. “My very fingertips rehearsed how they would work the keys of the trumpet, imagination’s trumpet, when I got ready to blow it at last. The peals of that brass would be heard beyond the earth, out in space itself. When that Messiah, that savior faculty the imagination was roused, finally we could look again with open eyes upon the whole shining earth.”

— Saul Bellow

462. “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

463. “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

464. “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

465. “Of course, I have known for a long time that we have inherited a mad fear of being slighted or scorned, an exacerbated “honor.” It is not quite the duelist’s madness of a hundred years ago, but we are a people of tantrums nevertheless. A word exchanged in a movie or some other crowd, and we are ready to fly at one another.”

— Saul Bellow

466. “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

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

— Saul Bellow

468. “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

469. “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

470. “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

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. “But can thought wake you from the dream of existence? Not if it becomes a second realm of confusion, another more complicated dream, the dream of intellect, the delusion of total explanations.”

— Saul Bellow

473. “Dr. Adler surrendered his arm to the masseur, who was using wintergreen oil.”

— Saul Bellow

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

— Saul Bellow

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

— Saul Bellow

476. “But I’m thinking of the great death populations of the Gulags and the German labor camps. Why does the century – I don’t know how else to put it – underwrite so much destruction? There is a lameness that comes over all of us when we consider these facts.”

— Saul Bellow

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

— Saul Bellow

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

— Saul Bellow

479. “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