Top 450 Saul Bellow Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “At moments I dislike having a face, a nose, lips, because he has them.”

— Saul Bellow

152. “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

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

— Saul Bellow

154. “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

155. “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

156. “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

157. “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

158. “A man like you, humble for life, who wants to feel and live, has trouble – not wanting,” said Tamkin in his parenthetical fashion, “to exchange an ounce of soul for a pound of social power – he’ll never make it without help in a world like this.”

— Saul Bellow

159. “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

160. “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

161. “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

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

— Saul Bellow

163. “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

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

— Saul Bellow

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

— Saul Bellow

166. “The earth was a grave: our life was lent to it by its elements and had to be returned: a time came when the simple elements seemed to long for release from the complicated forms of life, when every element of every cell said, “Enough!” The planet was our mother and our burial ground. No wonder the human spirit wished to leave. Leave this prolific belly. Leave also this great tomb. Passion for the infinite caused by the terror, by timor mortis, needed material appeasement.”

— Saul Bellow

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

— Saul Bellow

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

— Saul Bellow

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

— Saul Bellow

170. “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

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

— Saul Bellow

172. “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

173. “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

174. “Fidelity is for phonographs.”

— Saul Bellow

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

— Saul Bellow

176. “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

177. “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

178. “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

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

— Saul Bellow

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

— Saul Bellow

181. “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

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

— Saul Bellow

183. “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

184. “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

185. “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

186. “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

187. “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

188. “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

189. “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

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

— Saul Bellow

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

— Saul Bellow

192. “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

193. “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

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

— Saul Bellow

195. “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

196. “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

197. “I once was married,” said Padilla when the subject came to that. “In Chihuahua when I was fifteen. I had a kid before I was a man myself.” I didn’t approve of his boasting that he had left a wife and kid behind in Mexico, but then the tall girl said she had a child too, and maybe the other did also and just didn’t say, and so I let the subject pass, since if so many do the same wrong there maybe is something to it that’s not right away apparent.”

— Saul Bellow

198. “The soul has to find and hold its ground against hostile forces, sometimes embodied in ideas which frequently deny its very existence, and which indeed often seem to be trying to annul it altogether.”

— Saul Bellow

199. “It wasn’t that he was specially ungenerous but that he put things off to give his generosity a longer and more significant route.”

— Saul Bellow

200. “And what about all the good I have in my heart – does it mean anything?”

— Saul Bellow