Top 450 Saul Bellow Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “Humankind is still fooling around with hypocrisy, I thought. They don’t realize that it’s too late even for that.”

— Saul Bellow

302. “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

303. “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

304. “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

305. “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

306. “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

307. “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

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

— Saul Bellow

309. “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

310. “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

311. “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

312. “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

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

— Saul Bellow

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

— Saul Bellow

315. “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

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

— Saul Bellow

317. “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

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

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

— Saul Bellow

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

— Saul Bellow

324. “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

325. “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

326. “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

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

— Saul Bellow

328. “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

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

— Saul Bellow

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

— Saul Bellow

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

— Saul Bellow

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

— Saul Bellow

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

— Saul Bellow

334. “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

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

— Saul Bellow

336. “Ljepota nije ljudski izum.”

— Saul Bellow

337. “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

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

— Saul Bellow

339. “A wide wrinkle like a comprehensive bracket sign was written upon his forehead, the point between his brows, and there were patches of brown on his dark-blond skin.”

— Saul Bellow

340. “A white December sky overly the Atlantic gloom. The message of Nature seemed to be that conditions were severe, that things were tough, very tough, and that people should console one another.”

— Saul Bellow

341. “I brought all this on myself by telling Ramona the story of my life – how I rose from humble origins to complete disaster. But a man who has made so many mistakes can’t afford to ignore the corrections of his friends. Friends like Sandor, that humped rat. Or like Valentine, the moral megalomaniac and prophet in Israel. To all such, one is well advised to listen. Scolding is better than nothing. At least it’s company.”

— Saul Bellow

342. “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

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

— Saul Bellow

344. “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

345. “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

346. “We had an enormous sunset, a smashing of gaudy colours, apocalyptic reds and purples such as must have appeared on the punished bodies of great saints, blues heavy and rich. I woke Iva, and we watched it, hand in hand. Her hand was cool and sweet. I had a slight fever.”

— Saul Bellow

347. “Every man realizes that he has to love something or somebody. He feels that he must go outward. ‘If thou canst not love, what art thou?”

— Saul Bellow

348. “Pretpostavimo da sam ja apsolutno u pravu a da monsignor, na primjer, ima potpuno krivo. Ako sam ja u pravu, problem suvislosti svijeta, i sva odgovornost za nju, postaju moji.”

— Saul Bellow

349. “Unrequited love. Nowadays called hysterical dependency.”

— Saul Bellow

350. “Now: the first requirement of stability in a human being was that the said human being should really desire to exist. This is what Spinoza says.”

— Saul Bellow