Top 500 Saul Bellow Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “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

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

— Saul Bellow

203. “And when I say that he lost his head, what I mean is not that his judgement abandoned him but that his enthusiasms and visions swept him far out.”

— Saul Bellow

204. “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

205. “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

206. “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

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

— Saul Bellow

208. “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

209. “It’s no disgrace to be a private, you know. Socrates was a plain foot soldier, a hoplite.”

— Saul Bellow

210. “Some people, if they didn’t make it hard for themselves, might fall asleep,” said Mintouchian. “Even the Son of Man made it hard so He would have enough in common with our race to be its God.”

— Saul Bellow

211. “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

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

— Saul Bellow

213. “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

214. “Would never understand what women want. What do they want? They breath salad and drink human blood.”

— Saul Bellow

215. “My God! Who is this creature? It considers itself human.”

— Saul Bellow

216. “A good man can bear to listen to another talk about himself.”

— Saul Bellow

217. “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

218. “It is a joy to be choked with thought.”

— Saul Bellow

219. “Just because your soul is being torn to pieces doesn’t mean that you stop analyzing the phenomena.”

— Saul Bellow

220. “There I stretched out on the low bed and remained for days, sick. If Tertullian came to the window of heaven to rejoice in the sight of the damned, as he said he’d do, he might have seen my leg across his line of vision through the sunlight. That was how I felt.”

— Saul Bellow

221. “Just then his state of being was so curious that he was compelled, himself, to see it – eager, grieving, fantastic, dangerous, crazed and, to the point of death, “comical.” It was enough to make a man pray to God to remove this great, bone-breaking burden of selfhood and self-development, give himself, a failure, back to the species for a primitive cure.”

— Saul Bellow

222. “Look here, because they were born you think they have to turn out to be men? That’s just an old-fashioned idea. And who tells them that? A big organization. One more big organization. A big organization makes dough or it doesn’t last. If it makes dough it’s for dough.”

— Saul Bellow

223. “Well, what o you want?” I said. “I am the type of guy who couldn’t survive without disfigurement. Life has worked me over. It wasn’t just the war, either... I got a bad wound, you know. But the shots of life... ” I gave myself a bang on the breast. “Right here! You know what I mean, King?”

— Saul Bellow

224. “But what if you get nailed?” He said, “I’ll explain how I feel about it. You see, I don’t have larceny in my heart; I’m not a real crook. I’m not interested in it, so nobody can make a fate of it for me. That’s not my fate. I might get into a little trouble, but I never would let them make it my trouble, get it?” I.”

— Saul Bellow

225. “And everything soon must change. Men would set their watches by other suns than this. Or time would vanish. We would need no personal names of the old sort in the sidereal future, nothing being fixed. We would be designated by other nouns. Days and nights would belong to the museums. The earth a memorial park, a merry-go-round cemetery. The seas powdering our bones like quartz, making sand, grinding our peace for us by the aeon. Well, that would be good – a melancholy good.”

— Saul Bellow

226. “But when he sat down for a moment on the bed, all the comedy of it was snatched away and torn to pieces. He was wrong about the woman’s expression: he was trying to transform it into something he could bear. The truth was probably far different. He had started out to see what had happened with her eyes and had ended by substituting his own, thus contriving to put her on his side.”

— Saul Bellow

227. “If love is love, it’s free.”

— Saul Bellow

228. “Language is a spiritual mansion in which you live and nobody has the right to evict you.”

— Saul Bellow

229. “The two real problems in life are boredom and death.”

— Saul Bellow

230. “Whatever the man’s age, history, condition, knowledge, culture, development, he had an erection. Good currency anywhere. Recognized by the Bank of England.”

— Saul Bellow

231. “If energy is delight and exuberance is beauty, the manic depressive knows more about life than anyone else. Didn’t Freud say happiness was nothing more than the remission of pain? So, the more pain, the intenser the happiness.”

— Saul Bellow

232. “Of course! Easily or not at all. People were mad to be knocking themselves out over difficulties because they thought difficulty was a sign of the right thing.”

— Saul Bellow

233. “And the process started over again. Once more it was, Who are you? And I had to confess that I didn’t know where to begin.”

— Saul Bellow

234. “A bit of ideology and being up to date is most apropos,” Chekhov said – tongue in cheek, I suspect. In a more serious vein, he wrote that writers “should engage in politics only enough to protect themselves from politics.”

— Saul Bellow

235. “We take foreigners to be incomplete Americans – convinced that we must help and hasten their evolution.”

— Saul Bellow

236. “But in the end I said, ‘It’s terribly serious, of course, but I think more people die of heartbreak than of radiation.”

— Saul Bellow

237. “I’ve discovered that rejections are not altogether a bad thing. They teach a writer to rely on his own judgment and to say in his heart of hearts, ‘To hell with you.’”

— Saul Bellow

238. “Beauty is not a human invention.”

— Saul Bellow

239. “But fathers are soft on daughters. Look how Dad favors Angela. He gave her ten times more. Because she reminded him of Mae West. He was always smiling at her boobs. He wasn’t aware of it. Mother and I saw it.”

— Saul Bellow

240. “The first undressing of two lovers is a most special event.”

— Saul Bellow

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

241. “But I was afraid I’d have to give up on an ideal explanation of her past life. Oh well, there didn’t have to be one necessarily.”

— Saul Bellow

242. “Her hips were long and narrow, her bust was large, and she wore close-fitting skirts and sweaters and high heels that gave a tight arch of impatience to the muscles of her calves; her step was small and pretty and her laughter violent, total, and critical.”

— Saul Bellow

243. “I don’t know how it all at once came to me to talk a lot, tell jokes, kick up, and suddenly have views. When it was time to have them, there was no telling how I picked them from the air.”

— Saul Bellow

244. “Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul!”

— Saul Bellow

245. “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.”

— Saul Bellow

246. “But the blind did not go around very much. They sat, and didn’t seem to have any conversation, and soon you were aware of leisure gone bad. I had learned something of this during Einhorn’s days of dirty mental weather. Or of the soul, not the mind, the sick evil of not even knowing why anything should ail you since you’re resigned to accept all conditions.”

— Saul Bellow

247. “Whenever I write a dramatic poem I can’t understand why the characters should ever want to be anything but poets themselves.”

— Saul Bellow

248. “Did I say that the world had never had better color? I left something out of account, a limping, crippled consideration which seems to lose ground as you reach beauty and Orizaba flowers, but soon you find it has preceded you.”

— Saul Bellow

249. “Death is going to take the boundaries away from us, that we should no more be persons. That’s what death is about. When that is what life also wants to be about, how can you feel except rebellious?”

— Saul Bellow

250. “In this view the body itself, with its two arms and vertical length, was compared to the Cross, on which you knew the agony of consciousness and separate being.”

— Saul Bellow