Top 450 Saul Bellow Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “Creative is nature. Rapid. Lavish. Inspirational. It shapes leaves. It rolls the waters of the earth. Man is the chief of this. All creations are his just inheritance.”

— Saul Bellow

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

— Saul Bellow

253. “Beauty is not a human invention.”

— Saul Bellow

254. “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

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

— Saul Bellow

256. “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

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

— Saul Bellow

258. “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

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

— Saul Bellow

260. “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

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

— Saul Bellow

262. “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

263. “Even if I am not the honestest type in the world I don’t want to lie more than is average.”

— Saul Bellow

264. “Keep out of this, please, will you, Mildred? A child isn’t a toy.” “Oh,” she said, “they grow up. Time does it more than fathers and mothers. The parents take too much credit.”

— Saul Bellow

265. “I’ve had all the monstrosity I want.”

— Saul Bellow

266. “Take the fact that people generally were full of loathing and it cost them an effort to look at one another. Mostly they wanted to be let alone. And they dug for unreality more than for treasure, unreality being last great hope because then they could doubt that what they knew about themselves was true.”

— Saul Bellow

267. “Do we always, always to the point of misery, do a thing?”

— Saul Bellow

268. “In any true life you must go and be exposed outside the small circle that encompasses two or three heads in the same history of love.”

— Saul Bellow

269. “He had come into a view of mutability, and I too could see that one is only ostensibly born to remain in specified limits.”

— Saul Bellow

270. “Seashores are good for madmen – provided they’re not too mad.”

— Saul Bellow

271. “There’s nothing worse than being confused, too, in addition to being unlucky.”

— Saul Bellow

272. “My next idea was how nothing was more dreadful than to be forced by another to feel his persuasion as to how horrible it is to exist, how deathly to hope, and taste the same despair. How of all the impositions this was the worst imposition. Not just to be as they make you but to feel as they dictate. If you didn’t have the strongest alliance you surely would despair at last and your mouth would drink blood.”

— Saul Bellow

273. “Everyone got bitterness in his chosen thing. It might be in the end that the chosen thing that the chosen thing in itself is bitterness because to arrive at the chosen thing needs courage, because it’s intense, and intensity is what the feeble humanity of us can’t take for long. And also the chosen thing can’t be one that we already have, since what we already have there isn’t much use or respect for.”

— Saul Bellow

274. “I don’t know exactly how it’s done. I let it alone a good deal.”

— Saul Bellow

275. “We took the coal-and-ice dealers into taverns and drank beer and swapped talk, in those sleepy and dark with heat joints where the very flies crept rather than flew, seeming doped by the urinal camphors and malt sourness, and from the heated emptiness and woodblock-knocking of the baseball broadcast that gave only more constriction to the unlocatable, undiagnosed wrong.”

— Saul Bellow

276. “To accept too many favors from Ramona was dangerous. He might have to pay with his freedom. Of course he didn’t need that freedom now; he needed a rest. Still, after resting, he might want his freedom again. He wasn’t sure of that, either. But it was a possibility.”

— Saul Bellow

277. “I am giving up the violin. I guess I will never reach my object through it,” to raise my spirit from the earth, to leave the body of this death. I was very stubborn. I wanted to raise myself into another world. My life and deeds were a prison.”

— Saul Bellow

278. “I still had the craving that I had given in to all summer long when I had lived on books, to have the reach to grasp both ends of the frame and turn the big image-taking glass to any scene of the world.”

— Saul Bellow

279. “What use was war without also love?”

— Saul Bellow

280. “I’m deprived of my children.” Wilhelm bit his lip. It was too late to turn away. The anguish struck him. “I pay and pay. I never see them. They grow up without me. She makes them like herself. She’ll bring them up to be my enemies.”

— Saul Bellow

281. “Death discredits. Survival is the whole success. The voice of the dead goes away. There isn’t any memory. The power that’s established fills the earth and destiny is whatever survives, so whatever is is right.”

— Saul Bellow

282. “Alternatives, and particularly desirable alternatives, grow only on imaginary trees.”

— Saul Bellow

283. “Was she not so simple and free of ulterior motives as she looked? Well, neither was I.”

— Saul Bellow

284. “You saw how he put his paws over my face so I couldn’t breathe?” she said. “God made him to be a butcher. Why did he become a dentist? His hands are too heavy. The touch is everything to a dentist. If his hands aren’t right he shouldn’t be let practice. But his wife worked hard to send him through school and make a dentist of him. And I must go to him and be burned because of it.”

— Saul Bellow

285. “That’s swell. That’s what I call answering like a man. When is your birthday?” “In January.” “I’d have sworn to it. So is mine. I believe the highest types are born in January. It’s barometric – you can look it up in Ellsworth Huntington. The parents make love in spring when the organism is healthiest and then the best specimens are conceived. If you want children you should plan to knock up your dear one in that season. Ancient wisdom is right. Now science comes lately and finds it out.”

— Saul Bellow

286. “Anyway, it was an age of spiritual exhaustion – all the old dreams were dreamed out. I was angry; I burned like that furnace; reading more, sick with rage.”

— Saul Bellow

287. “These were his friends of the business community; a man in business had to have such, and he visited and entertained but neither touched nor was touched, ever.”

— Saul Bellow

288. “I quit thinking long ago that all old people came to rest from the things they were out for in their younger years.”

— Saul Bellow

289. “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

290. “Oh, God,” Wilhelm prayed, “Let me out of my trouble. Let me out of my thoughts, and let me do something better with myself. For all the time I have wasted I am very sorry. Let me out of this clutch and into a different life. For I am all balled up. Have mercy.”

— Saul Bellow

291. “In the depths of a man’s being there was something that responded with a quack to such perfume. Quack!”

— Saul Bellow

292. “I wonder whether there will ever be enough tranquility under modern circumstances to allow our contemporary Wordsworth to recollect anything. I feel that art has something to do with the achievement of stillness in the midst of chaos. A stillness that characterizes prayer, too, and the eye of the storm. I think that art has something to do with an arrest of attention in the midst of distraction.”

— Saul Bellow

293. “I have, perhaps, a slave-like constitution which is too easily restrained by bonds; it then becomes rebellious and bursts out in a comic revolution.”

— Saul Bellow

294. “Humankind is still fooling around with hypocrisy, I thought. They don’t realize that it’s too late even for that.”

— Saul Bellow

295. “Sometimes I wonder,” I said, “if people who are going to tell the truth shouldn’t make sure first that they can defend themselves.”

— Saul Bellow

296. “There’s the most extraordinary, unheard of poetry buried in America, but none of the conventional means known to culture can even begin to extract it... the agony is too deep, the disorder too big for art enterprises undertaken in the old way.”

— Saul Bellow

297. “You have to have the power to employ pain, to repent, to be illuminated, you must have the opportunity and even the time.”

— Saul Bellow

298. “Only self-hatred could lead him to ruin himself because his heart was “broken.”

— Saul Bellow

299. “Hapiness can only be found if you can free yourself of all other distractions.”

— Saul Bellow

300. “If you could arrange to avoid that routine job-world, you were an intellectual or an artist. Too restless, tremorous, agitated, too mad to sit at a desk eight hours a day, you needed an institution – a higher institution.”

— Saul Bellow