Top 450 Saul Bellow Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 7 of 10

301. “Nobody should pretend to be always one hundred per cent honest. I wish I knew how to be seventy, sixty per cent.” I swore she must be one hundred and ten, two hundred.”

— Saul Bellow

302. “The true soul is the one that pays the price. It suffers and gets sick, and it realizes that the pretender can’t be loved.”

— Saul Bellow

303. “What was the matter that pureness of feeling couldn’t be kept up? I see I met those writers in the big book of utopias at a peculiar time. In those utopias, set up by hopes and art, how could you overlook the part of nature or be sure you could keep the feelings up?”

— Saul Bellow

304. “Americans find it hard to believe that foreigners are unalterably foreign, for they have seen generations of immigrants who became Americans. But old cultures are impermeable and exclusive – none more so than the French.”

— Saul Bellow

305. “It’s no small matter to become rich and famous by saying exactly what you think – to say it in your own words, without compromise.”

— Saul Bellow

306. “Mine was the sort of heart that had to overcome melancholy and free itself from many depressing weights.”

— Saul Bellow

307. “There were people who believed Herzog was rather simple, that his humane feelings were childish. That he had been spared the destruction of certain sentiments as the pet goose is spared the axe.”

— Saul Bellow

308. “Even worse is the discovery that one has been living out certain greeting-card sentiments, with ribbons of middle-class virtue tied in a bow around one’s heart.”

— Saul Bellow

309. “Odd that mankind’s benefactors should be amusing people. In America at least this is often the case. Anyone who wants to govern the country has to entertain.”

— Saul Bellow

310. “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

311. “Nobody should be a mystery intentionally. Unintentionally is mysterious enough.”

— Saul Bellow

312. “With his friends, an egotist. With love, lazy. With brightness, dull. With power, passive. With his own soul, evasive.”

— Saul Bellow

313. “If this was so, I was sunk, for by now I was more in love than I could stand, as if some mineral had got into my veins and arteries and I ached, flesh and bones, the way you will on the verge of the grippe.”

— Saul Bellow

314. “As for Sono, she was trying to instruct him, to show how a man should treat a woman. The pride of the peacock, the lust of the goat, and the wrath of the lion are the glory and wisdom of God.”

— Saul Bellow

315. “Oh yes, I got up on my hindlegs like an orator and sounded off to everyone.”

— Saul Bellow

316. “When finally you’re done speaking you’re dumb forever after, and when you’re through stirring you go still, but this is no reason to decline to speak and stir or to be what you are.”

— Saul Bellow

317. “He knew he would think better clearer thoughts after bathing in the sea. His mother had believed in the good effects of bathing, but she had died so young.”

— Saul Bellow

318. “And where was that day? Past and dead. Whose humiliating memories were these? His and not his father’s. What had he to think back on that he could call good? Very, very little. You had to forgive. First, to forgive yourself, and then, general forgiveness.”

— Saul Bellow

319. “The real and essential question is one of our employment by other human beings and their employment by us.”

— Saul Bellow

320. “More of fear than of any other thing has been created.”

— Saul Bellow

321. “The poor guy,” she said, and this was remorse over her savage speed and rashness as well as pity for this boy, haunting the mouth of an alley with that toy of swift decisions.”

— Saul Bellow

322. “You take too many pills of every kind – first stimulants and then depressants, anodynes followed by analeptics, until the poor organism doesn’t know what’s happened.”

— Saul Bellow

323. “It means that writers are supposed to make you laugh and cry. That’s what mankind is looking for.”

— Saul Bellow

324. “Apes in their own habitat are less sexually driven than those in captivity. It must be that captivity, boredom, breeds lustfulness.”

— Saul Bellow

325. “Yes, there are good reasons for revulsion and fear. But revulsion and fear impair judgment. Anxiety destroys scale, and suffering makes us lose perspective.”

— Saul Bellow

326. “But i am a prisoner of perception, a compulsory witness.”

— Saul Bellow

327. “The people who come to evening classes are only ostensibly after culture. Their great need, their hunger, is for good sense, clarity, truth – even an atom of it. People are dying – it is no metaphor – for lack of something real to carry home when day is done.”

— Saul Bellow

328. “Innately, the female knows how to cripple by sickening a man with guilt. It is a very special destruct, and she sends her curse to make a fellow impotent.”

— Saul Bellow

329. “If a man disliked you, he would dislike you for all the reasons he could think of.”

— Saul Bellow

330. “So many questions impossible to answer could not be asked about an honest man. Nor perhaps about a sane man.”

— Saul Bellow

331. “History is the history of cruelty, not love, as soft men think.”

— Saul Bellow

332. “One of life’s hardest jobs, to make a quick understanding slow.”

— Saul Bellow

333. “It hardly does much good to have a complex mind without actually being a philosopher.”

— Saul Bellow

334. “Everybody is busy. Every man turns himself into a whole corporation to handle the business.”

— Saul Bellow

335. “What’s life? Metabolism? That’s what it is for the bugs.”

— Saul Bellow

336. “But on the way to the wedding I saw it was a mistake. I tried to get out of the car at a stoplight in my wedding dress, but he caught me and pulled me back. He punched me in the eye,” she said, “and it was a good thing I had a veil because the eye turned black, and I cried all the way through the ceremony. Also, my mother is dead.”

— Saul Bellow

337. “Why, it was a crying matter, no fooling, to anyone who might know which side was up, that here was I trying to refuse to lead a disappointed life.”

— Saul Bellow

338. “What did Danton lose his head for, or why was there a Napoleon, if it wasn’t to make a nobility of us all?”

— Saul Bellow

339. “Ljepota nije ljudski izum.”

— Saul Bellow

340. “We are survivors, in this age, so theories of progress ill become us, because we are intimately acquainted with the costs. To realize that you are a survivor is a shock.”

— Saul Bellow

341. “But I wasn’t inclined to go out of my way to defer to so many critics. I had a good grasp of reality and of my defects. I permanently kept in mind the approach of Death, who might at any time loom up before you.”

— Saul Bellow

342. “You must take your chance on what you are. And you can’t sit still. I know this double poser, that if you make a move you may lose but if you sit still you will decay. But what will you lose? You will not invent better than God or nature or turn yourself into the man who lacks no gift or development before you make the move. This is not given to us.”

— Saul Bellow

343. “The good are attracted by men’s perceptions and think not for themselves. You must cleanse the gates of vision by self-knowledge, by experience. Besides which, opposition is true friendship. So they tell me.”

— Saul Bellow

344. “Dopo aver riflettuto a lungo, esitato, e lottato con se stesso, invariabilmente sceglieva la strada che innumerevoli volte aveva respinto. Una.”

— Saul Bellow

345. “You are lazy, disgraceful, tougher than you think but not yet a dead loss. In part you are humanly okay. We are supposed to do something for our kind. Don’t get frenzied about money. Overcome your greed. Better luck with women. Last of all – remember: we are not natural beings but supernatural beings.”

— Saul Bellow

346. “That’s from the Middle Ages.’ My God! We have a name for everything except what we really think and feel.”

— Saul Bellow

347. “He had on a double-breasted suit of the type then known as the pillbox; it was chalk-striped, pink on blue; the trousers hugged his ankles.”

— Saul Bellow

348. “Reality instructors. They want to teach you – to punish you with – the lessons of the Real.”

— Saul Bellow

349. “Answer a fool according to his folly lest he be wise in his own conceit. Answer not a fool according to his folly, lest thou be like unto him. Choose one.”

— Saul Bellow

350. “That was nothing to get excited about, as it was one of the commoner human experiences – neither to give a damn nor be given a damn about.”

— Saul Bellow