Top 450 Saul Bellow Quotes (2026 Update)
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301. “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

302. “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

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

— Saul Bellow

305. “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

306. “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

307. “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

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

— Saul Bellow

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

— Saul Bellow

310. “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

311. “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

312. “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

313. “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

314. “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

315. “Not that long disease, my life, but that long convalescence, my life. The liberal-bourgeois revision, the illusion of improvement, the poison of hope.”

— Saul Bellow

316. “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

317. “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

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

— Saul Bellow

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

— Saul Bellow

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

— Saul Bellow

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

— Saul Bellow

322. “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

323. “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

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

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

— Saul Bellow

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

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

— Saul Bellow

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

— Saul Bellow

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

— Saul Bellow

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

— Saul Bellow

334. “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

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

— Saul Bellow

336. “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

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

— Saul Bellow

339. “And truth is true only as it brings down more disgrace and dreariness upon human beings, so that if it shows anything except evil it is illusion, and not truth.”

— Saul Bellow

340. “Grielescu was a famous scholar, not exactly a follower of Jung – but not exactly not a Jungian. He was a hard one to place.”

— Saul Bellow

341. “You see, I understand what it is when the lonely person begins to feel like an animal.”

— Saul Bellow

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

— Saul Bellow

343. “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

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

— Saul Bellow

345. “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

346. “Ljepota nije ljudski izum.”

— Saul Bellow

347. “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

348. “And I saw Clara Spohr coming from the Oyster Bar or being washed forth into this sea, dismasted, clinging to her soul in the shipwreck of her beauty.”

— Saul Bellow

349. “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

350. “I imagine, sometimes, that if a film could be made of one’s life, every other frame would be death. It goes so fast we’re not aware of it. Destruction and resurrection in alternate beats of being, but speed makes it seem continuous. But you see, kid, with ordinary consciousness you can’t even begin to know what’s happening.”

— Saul Bellow