Top 450 Saul Bellow Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “If life is not intoxicating, it’s nothing. Here it’s burn or rot.”

— Saul Bellow

202. “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

203. “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

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

— Saul Bellow

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

— Saul Bellow

206. “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

207. “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

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

— Saul Bellow

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

— Saul Bellow

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

— Saul Bellow

211. “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

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

— Saul Bellow

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

— Saul Bellow

214. “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

215. “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

216. “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

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

— Saul Bellow

218. “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

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

— Saul Bellow

220. “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

221. “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

222. “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

223. “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

224. “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

225. “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

226. “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

227. “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

228. “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

229. “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

230. “If love is love, it’s free.”

— Saul Bellow

231. “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

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

— Saul Bellow

233. “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

234. “Thoughts should be real. Words should have a definite meanings and a man should believe what he said.”

— Saul Bellow

235. “Beauty is not a human invention.”

— Saul Bellow

236. “Everybody I ever knew wanted to show in some way how he held the world together. This only comes from feeling the strain of holding yourself together, and it gets exaggerated into the whole world from the hard labor you put into it.”

— Saul Bellow

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

— Saul Bellow

238. “I guess nothing restrains people from demanding ideal conditions. Very little restrains them from anything.”

— Saul Bellow

239. “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

240. “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

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

— Saul Bellow

242. “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

243. “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

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

— Saul Bellow

245. “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

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

— Saul Bellow

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

— Saul Bellow

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

— Saul Bellow

249. “Fitness was not his cup of tea. He treated his body like a vehicle – a motorbike that he raced at top speed along the rim of the Grand Canyon.”

— Saul Bellow

250. “So things go on as before with those who think a great deal and effect nothing, and those who think nothing evidently doing it all...”

— Saul Bellow