Top 450 Saul Bellow Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “There is an immense, painful longing for a broader, more flexible, fuller, more coherent, more comprehensive account of what we human beings are, who we are and what this life is for.”

— Saul Bellow

152. “He looked down through the green transparency to the stony bottom webbed with golden lines. Never still. If his soul could cast a reflection so briljant, and so intensely sweet, he might beg God to make such use of him. But that would be too childish. The actual sphere is not clear like this, but turbulent, angry. A vast human action is going on. Death watches. So if you have some happiness, conceal it. And when your heart is full, keep your mouth shut also.”

— Saul Bellow

153. “Everybody wants to have intimate conversations, but the smart fellows don’t give out, only the fools. The smart fellows talk intimately about the fools, and examine them all over and give them advice.”

— Saul Bellow

154. “Do you have feelings? There are correct and incorrect ways of indicating them. Do you have an inner life? It is nobody’s business but your own. Do you have emotions? Strangle them.”

— Saul Bellow

155. “Any artist should be grateful for a naive grace which puts him beyond the need to reason elaborately.”

— Saul Bellow

156. “Here we write well when we expose frauds and hypocrites. We are great at counting warts and blemishes and weighting feet of clay. In expressing love, we belong among the underdeveloped countries.”

— Saul Bellow

157. “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

158. “The flesh would shrink and go, the blood would dry, but no one believes in his mind of minds or heart of hearts that the pictures do stop.”

— Saul Bellow

159. “Under the changes of weather it may look like marble or like sea water, black as slate in the fog, white as tufa in sunlight.”

— Saul Bellow

160. “And I dreamed down at the clouds, and thought that when I was a kid I had dreamed up at them, and having dreamed at the clouds from both sides as no other generation of men has done, one should be able to accept his death very easily.”

— Saul Bellow

161. “Compulsory veneration is bound to come out as rebellion, hatred, and blasphemy.”

— Saul Bellow

162. “Strict seriousness was far more dangerous than any joke.”

— Saul Bellow

163. “Psychoanalysis pretends to investigate the Unconscious. The Unconscious by definition is what you are not conscious of. But the Analysts already know what’s in it – they should, because they put it all in beforehand.”

— Saul Bellow

164. “The best and purest human beings, from the beginning of time, have understood that life is sacred.”

— Saul Bellow

165. “A person can become tired of looking himself over and trying to fix himself up. You can spend the entire second half of your life recovering from the mistakes of the first half.”

— Saul Bellow

166. “The sense in which Goethe was right: Continued life means expectation, Death is the abolition of choice. The more choice is limited, the closer we are to death. The greatest cruelty is to curtail expectations without taking away life completely. A life term in prison is like that. So is citizenship in some countries. The best solution would be to live as if the ordinary expectations had not been removed, not from day to day, blindly. But that requires immense self-mastery.”

— Saul Bellow

167. “Maybe America didn’t need art and inner miracles. It had so many outer ones. The USA was a big operation, very big. The more it, the less we.”

— Saul Bellow

168. “Certain blood will be given for half certain reasons, as in all wars.”

— Saul Bellow

169. “All a writer has to do to get a woman is to say he’s a writer. It’s an aphrodisiac.”

— Saul Bellow

170. “I think that New York is not the cultural centre of America, but the business and administrative centre of American culture.”

— Saul Bellow

171. “And I’m convinced that knowing the names of things braces people up.”

— Saul Bellow

172. “You have, like the external world, your own phenomena inside.”

— Saul Bellow

173. “I have begun in old age to understand just how oddly we all are put together. We are so proud of our autonomy that we seldom if ever realize how generous we are to ourselves, and just how stingy with others. One of the booby traps of freedom – which is bordered on all sides by isolation – is that we think so well of ourselves. I now see that I have helped myself to the best cuts at life’s banquet.”

— Saul Bellow

174. “Guys like you make life easy for some women.”

— Saul Bellow

175. “I love solitude but I prize it most when company is available.”

— Saul Bellow

176. “I don’t actually take much stock in the collapsing culture bit. I’m beginning to see it instead as the conduct of life without input from your soul.”

— Saul Bellow

177. “The terms which, in his inmost heart, each man knows. As I know mine. As all know. For that is the truth of it – that we all know, God, that we know, that we know, we know, we know.”

— Saul Bellow

178. “More commonly suffering breaks people, crushes them, and is simply unilluminating. You see how gruesomely human beings are destroyed by pain, when they have the added torment of losing their humanity first, so that their death is a total defeat...”

— Saul Bellow

179. “Goodness is achieved not in a vacuum, but in the company of other men, attended by love.”

— Saul Bellow

180. “Americans must be the most sententious people in history. Far too busy to be religious, they have always felt that they sorely needed guidance.”

— Saul Bellow

181. “Ninety per cent of life is a nightmare, do you think I am going to get it rounded up to hundred per cent?”

— Saul Bellow

182. “He chased ruin and death even harder than he had chased women. He blew his talent and his health and reached home, the grave, in a dusty slide.”

— Saul Bellow

183. “Fidelity is for phonographs.”

— Saul Bellow

184. “De Tocqueville considered the impulse toward well-being as one of the strongest impulses of a democratic society. He can’t be blamed for underestimating the destructive powers generated by this same impulse.”

— Saul Bellow

185. “One of the booby traps of freedom – which is bordered on all sides by isolation – is that we think so well of ourselves. I now see that I have helped myself to the best cuts at life’s banquet.”

— Saul Bellow

186. “The best argument is an undeniably good book.”

— Saul Bellow

187. “IT TAKES SOME OF US a long time to find out what the price is of being in nature, and what the facts are about your tenure. How long it takes depends on how swiftly the social sugars dissolve. But when at last they do dissolve there’s a different taste in your mouth, bringing different news which registers with dark astonishment and fills your eyes. And this different news is that from vast existence in some way you rise up and at any moment you may go back. Any moment; the very next, maybe.”

— Saul Bellow

188. “No true individual has existed yet, able to live, able to die. Only diseased, tragic, or dismal and ludicrous fools who sometimes hoped to achieve some ideal by fiat, by their great desire for it. But usually by bullying all mankind into believing them.”

— Saul Bellow

189. “Again! It was like the question asked by Tennyson about the flower in the crannied wall. That is, to answer it might involve the history of the universe.”

— Saul Bellow

190. “Some powerful magnificence not human in other words, seemed under me. And it was the same mild pink colour, like the water of a watermelon, that did it. At once I recognised the importance of this, as throughout my life I had known these moments when the dumb begin to speak, when I hear the voices of objects and colours; then the physical universe starts to wrinkle and change and heave and rise and smooth, so it seems even the dogs have to lean against a tree, shivering.”

— Saul Bellow

191. “People forget how sensational the things are that they do. They don’t see it on themselves. It blends into the background of their daily life.”

— Saul Bellow

192. “I would like to explain that I consider prayer above all an act of gratitude for existence.”

— Saul Bellow

193. “How should I know why! I didn’t invent human beings, Iggy.”

— Saul Bellow

194. “My soul is like a pawn shop. I mean it’s filled with unredeemed pleasures, old clarinets, and cameras, and motheaten fur.”

— Saul Bellow

195. “I think you ought to write, in bed, and make use of your unhappiness. I do it. Many do. One should cook and eat one’s misery. Chain it like a dog. Harness like Niagara Falls to generate light and supply voltage for electric chairs.”

— Saul Bellow

196. “To rip off a piece of lover’s temper was a pleasure in her deepest vein of enjoyment.”

— Saul Bellow

197. “The sun was shut up in a cold bottle.”

— Saul Bellow

198. “Because nobody anyhow can show what he is without a sense of exposure and shame, and can’t care while preoccupied with this but must appear better and stronger than anyone else, mad! And meantime feels no real strength in himself, cheats and gets cheated, relies on cheating but believes abnormally in the strength of the strong. All this time nothing genuine is allowed to appear and nobody knows what’s real. And that’s disfigured, degenerate, dark mankind – mere humanity. But.”

— Saul Bellow

199. “He believed that he must, that he could and would recover the good things, the happy things, the easy tranquil things of life. He had made mistakes, but he could overlook these. He had been a fool, but that could be forgiven. The time wasted – must be relinquished. What else could one do about it? Things were too complex, but they might be reduced to simplicity again. Recovery was possible.”

— Saul Bellow

200. “Greatness without models? Inconceivable. One could not be the thing itself – Reality. One must be satisfied with symbols. Make it the object of imitation to reach and release the high qualities. Make peace therefore with intermediacy and representations. Otherwise the individual must be the failure he now sees and knows himself to be.”

— Saul Bellow