Top 500 Saul Bellow Quotes (2026 Update)
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451. “Margaret would tell him he did not really want a divorce; he was afraid of it. He cried, “Take everything I’ve got, Margaret. Let me go to Reno. Don’t you want to marry again?” No. She went out with other men, but took his money. She lived in order to punish him.”

— Saul Bellow

452. “With a little luck, you discover that the people in your life, permanently placed, are able to follow your innermost, deeply concealed motives.”

— Saul Bellow

453. “Well, for instance, what it means to be a man. In a city. In a century. In transition. In a mass. Transformed by science. Under organized power. Subject to tremendous controls. In a condition caused by mechanization. After the late failure of radical hopes. In a society that was no community and devalued the person. Owing to the multiplied power of numbers which made the self negligible.”

— Saul Bellow

454. “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

455. “She just has fixed herself on me to kill me. She can do it at long distance. One of these days I’ll be struck down by suffocation or apoplexy because of her.”

— Saul Bellow

456. “Oh, death from what we do not want is the most common of all the causes.”

— Saul Bellow

457. “I know how long – endless – people’s stories are when they have grievances. And how tedious for everyone.”

— Saul Bellow

458. “But then he realized that he did not need to perform elaborate abstract intellectual work – work he had always thrown himself into as if it were the struggle for survival. But not thinking is not necessarily fatal. Did I really believe that I would die when thinking stopped? Now to fear such a thing – that’s really crazy.”

— Saul Bellow

459. “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

460. “Is it faith? Or is it simply childishness, expecting to be loved for doing your bidden task? It is, if you’re looking for the psychological explanation, childish and classically depressive.”

— Saul Bellow

461. “Looking for happiness – ought to be prepared for bad results.”

— Saul Bellow

462. “The challenge of modern freedom, or the combination of isolation and freedom which confronts you, is to make yourself up. The danger is that you may emerge from the process as a not-entirely-human creature.”

— Saul Bellow

463. “Why should one man have the power to damage all nature or pollute the entire world?”

— Saul Bellow

464. “Nine-tenths of modern innocence is little more than indifference to vice, a resolve not to be affected by all that you might read, hear, or see.”

— Saul Bellow

465. “No one seemed satisfied, and Wilhelm was especially horrified by the cynicism of successful people. Cynicism was bread and meat to everyone And irony, too. Maybe it couldn’t be helped.”

— Saul Bellow

466. “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

467. “No court would have awarded her the amounts he paid.”

— Saul Bellow

468. “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

469. “That’s right. That was bad. Especially winters. You should have had more sense. That house made a prisoner of her. It must have been just dreary, washing and cooking, and to have to hush the baby, or you’d raise hell, she said. You couldn’t think when June was crying, and you’d rush from your room hollering.” “Yes, I was stupid – a blockhead.”

— Saul Bellow

470. “And he makes all sorts of people feel that he has exactly what they’ve been looking for. Subtlety for the subtle. Warmth for the warm. For the crude, crudity. For the crooks, hypocrisy. Atrocity for the atrocious. Whatever your heart desires. Emotional plasma which can circulate in any system.”

— Saul Bellow

471. “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

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

— Saul Bellow

473. “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

474. “Now Gersbach always boomed along in conversation. He was so emphatic in style, so impressive in his glances, looked so clever that you forgot to inquire whether he was making sense.”

— Saul Bellow

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

— Saul Bellow

476. “I discovered, however, in the early days of our marriage that, in having her way, she put my interests ahead of her own.”

— Saul Bellow

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

— Saul Bellow

478. “Because today’s asylum might be the dungeon of tomorrow.”

— Saul Bellow

479. “When I was younger I used to think that my good intentions were somehow communicated to people by a secret telepathic wig-wag system. It was therefore disappointing to see at last that unless I spelt things out I couldn’t hope to get credit for goodwill.”

— Saul Bellow

480. “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

481. “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

482. “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

483. “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

484. “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

485. “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

486. “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

487. “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

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

— Saul Bellow

489. “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

490. “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

491. “To tell the truth, I never had it so good, he wrote. But I lacked the strength of character to bear such joy. That was hardly a joke. When a man’s breast feels like a cage from which all the dark birds have flown – he is free, he is light. And he longs to have his vultures back again. He wants his customary struggles, his nameless, empty works, his anger, his afflictions and his sins.”

— Saul Bellow

492. “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

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

— Saul Bellow

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

— Saul Bellow

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

— Saul Bellow

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

— Saul Bellow

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

— Saul Bellow

498. “What actually happened? I gave up the shelter of an orderly, purposeful, lawful existence because it bored me, and I felt it was simply a slacker’s life.”

— Saul Bellow

499. “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

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

— Saul Bellow