Top 450 Saul Bellow Quotes (2025 Update)
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451. “Is it an easier farewell for Dad if we don’t part friends?”

— Saul Bellow

452. “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

453. “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

454. “Unrequited love. Nowadays called hysterical dependency.”

— Saul Bellow

455. “Those are the only two classes of people there are. Some want to live, but the great majority don’t.”

— Saul Bellow

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

— Saul Bellow

457. “But then why shouldn’t he write the dead? He lived with them as much as with the living – perhaps more; and besides, his letters to the living were increasingly mental, and anyway, to the Unconscious, what was death? Dreams did not recognize it.”

— Saul Bellow

458. “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

459. “Death is good for some people.”

— Saul Bellow

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

— Saul Bellow

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

— Saul Bellow

462. “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

463. “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

464. “So deformity has overtaken love and love is a power that can’t let us alone. It can’t because we owe our existence to acts of love performed before us, because love is a standing debt of the soul.”

— Saul Bellow

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

— Saul Bellow

466. “Not that long disease, my life, but that long convalescence, my life. The liberal-bourgeois revision, the illusion of improvement, the poison of hope.”

— Saul Bellow

467. “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

468. “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

469. “Strict and literal truthfulness was a trivial game and might even be a disagreeable neurotic affliction.”

— Saul Bellow

470. “His marriage, too, had been like that. Through such decisions somehow his life had taken form. And so, from the moment when he tasted the peculiar flavor of fatality in Dr. Tamkin, he could no longer keep back the money.”

— Saul Bellow

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

— Saul Bellow

472. “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

473. “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

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

— Saul Bellow

475. “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

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

— Saul Bellow

477. “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

478. “I believe Uncle’s intuition to have been that plants functioned as sense organs, collecting cosmic data for the earth itself.”

— Saul Bellow

479. “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