Top 450 Saul Bellow Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “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

202. “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

203. “There’ve been times when just because I kept my mouth shut and didn’t say what I thought, I felt my strength increasing. Still, I don’t seem to know what i think till I see what i say.”

— Saul Bellow

204. “If life is not intoxicating, it’s nothing. Here it’s burn or rot.”

— Saul Bellow

205. “But the best-treated, most favored and intelligent part of any society is often the most ungrateful. Ingratitude, however, is its social function.”

— Saul Bellow

206. “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

207. “As long as I could keep improving my mind, I figured, I was doing okay.”

— Saul Bellow

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

— Saul Bellow

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

— Saul Bellow

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

— Saul Bellow

211. “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

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

— 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. “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

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

— Saul Bellow

216. “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

217. “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

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

— Saul Bellow

219. “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

220. “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

221. “If love is love, it’s free.”

— Saul Bellow

222. “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

223. “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

224. “It was clear that the man was no fool. But what was the use of not being a fool if you acted like this?”

— Saul Bellow

225. “Somewhere in every intellectual is a dumb prick.”

— Saul Bellow

226. “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

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

— Saul Bellow

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

— Saul Bellow

229. “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

230. “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

231. “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

232. “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

233. “History, memory – that is what makes us human, that, and our knowledge of death: ‘by man came death’. 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

234. “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

235. “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

236. “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

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

— Saul Bellow

238. “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

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

— Saul Bellow

240. “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

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

— Saul Bellow

242. “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

243. “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

244. “All at once he was aware that his angry spirit had stolen forth again and he was about to write letters.”

— Saul Bellow

245. “The same things are done by us, over and over, with terrible predictability. One may be forgiven, in view of this, for wishing at least to associate with beauty.”

— Saul Bellow

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

— Saul Bellow

247. “Therefore we didn’t talk of genuine things.”

— Saul Bellow

248. “Charlotte came in herself, like a big bridal edifice in her veil and other lace, carrying long-stemmed flowers. With her there wasn’t much hiding of the behind-the-scenes of life to keep a man in the bonds of love, as Lucretius advises when he tells you to make allowances for mortality. You only had to see her practical mouth to know everything about mortality was admitted in advance, though she did for form’s sake all that other women do. Her frankness gave her a kind of nobility.”

— Saul Bellow

249. “It was all there. Only he was not through with love and hate elsewhere.”

— Saul Bellow

250. “He liked to wear good clothes, but once he had put it on each article appeared to go its own way.”

— Saul Bellow