Top 450 Saul Bellow Quotes (2025 Update)
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451. “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

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

— Saul Bellow

453. “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

454. “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

455. “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

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

— Saul Bellow

457. “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

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

— Saul Bellow

459. “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

460. “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

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

— Saul Bellow

462. “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

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

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

— Saul Bellow

466. “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

467. “You had to talk with yourself in the daytime and reason with yourself at night. Who else was there to talk to in a city like New York?”

— Saul Bellow

468. “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

469. “This is the way of the weak; quiet and fair.”

— Saul Bellow

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

— Saul Bellow

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

— Saul Bellow

472. “More than human, can you have any use for life? Less than human, you don’t either.”

— Saul Bellow

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

— Saul Bellow

474. “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

475. “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

476. “Even in a few minutes’ conversation, do you realize how many times what you feel is converted before it comes out as what you say?”

— Saul Bellow

477. “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

478. “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

479. “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