Top 450 Saul Bellow Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 8 of 10

351. “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

352. “His taste in clothes was horrible, but he didn’t buy cheap things. He wore corduroy or velvet shirts from Clyde’s, painted neckties, striped socks.”

— Saul Bellow

353. “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

354. “You were lucky even then to make yourself understood. And this happened over and over and over with everyone you met. You had to translate and translate, explain and explain, back and forth, and it was the punishment of hell itself not to understand or be understood, not to know the crazy from the sane, the wise from the fools, the young from the old or the sick from the well.”

— Saul Bellow

355. “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

356. “He was the obscure failure of an aggressive and powerful clan.”

— Saul Bellow

357. “Affable! His own son, his one and only son, could not speak his mind or ease his heart to him.”

— Saul Bellow

358. “He meditated on his weakness.”

— Saul Bellow

359. “Now I was too old to be a pupil, and Ravelstein didn’t believe in adult education. It was far too late for me to Platonize. And what people called culture was nothing but a fancier term for their ignorance.”

— Saul Bellow

360. “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

361. “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

362. “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

363. “But oh, unreality! Unreality, unreality! That has been my scheme for a troubled but eternal life.”

— Saul Bellow

364. “Because of unhappiness, at a certain age, the brain starts to die back.”

— Saul Bellow

365. “Roumanian is an easy language. You just add a tl to everything.”

— Saul Bellow

366. “To have assumed, for instance, that the deterioration of language and its debasement was tantamount to dehumanization led straight to cultural fascism.”

— Saul Bellow

367. “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

368. “Korzybski, Aristotle, Freud, W. H. Sheldon, and all the great poets.”

— Saul Bellow

369. “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

370. “On the simplest level he could tell you in detail what he felt – what effects an aspirin had on him, what it did to the back of his neck or the inside of his mouth. I was curious about this, because for the life of them most people can’t describe what goes on inside. Alcoholics or druggies are too confused, hypochondriacs are their own terrorists, and most of us are aware only of a metabolic uproar within.”

— Saul Bellow

371. “His friend, his former friend, Valentine, and his wife, his ex-wife Madeleine, had spread the rumor that his sanity had collapsed.”

— Saul Bellow

372. “A rich man may be free on an income of a million net. A poor man may be free because nobody cares what he does. But a fellow in my position has to sweat it out until he drops dead.”

— Saul Bellow

373. “The secret of our being still asks to be unfolded. Only now we understand that worrying at it and ragging it is no use. The first step is to stop these oscillations of consciousness that are keeping me awake. Only, before you command the oscillations to stop, before you check out, you must maneuver yourself into a position in which metaphysical aid can approach.”

— Saul Bellow

374. “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

375. “His intellect would have been more effective if he had had an aggressive paranoid character, eager for power. He was jealous but not exceptionally competitive, not a true paranoiac.”

— Saul Bellow

376. “Anyone who wants to govern the country, has to entertain it.”

— Saul Bellow

377. “That meeting in the bank you believe in,” my wife, Rosamund, the real wife, later said, after I had described the moment to her. “Why would it be always the worst things which appear to you so real? Sometimes I wonder if I’ll ever be able to talk you out of being sadistic to yourself.”

— Saul Bellow

378. “But what about justice? – Justice! Look who wants justice! Most of mankind has lived and died without – totally without it. People by the billions and for ages sweated, gypped, enslaved, suffocated, bled to death, buried with no more justice than cattle.”

— Saul Bellow

379. “It’s the hysterical individual who allows his life to be polarized by simple extreme antitheses like strength – weakness, potency – impotence, health – sickness.”

— Saul Bellow

380. “It was the middle-class female solidarity, defending a nice girl from charges of calculation and viciousness. Nice girls marry for love. But should they fall out of love, they must be free to love another. No decent husband will oppose the heart.”

— Saul Bellow

381. “To God he jotted several lines. How my mind has struggled to make coherent sense. I have not been too good at it. But have desired to do your unknowable will, taking it, and you, without symbols. Everything of intensest significance. Especially if divested of me.”

— Saul Bellow

382. “I was beginning to think that my bag was lost when I saw it wobbling, solitary, on the long, long line of rollers. It came towards me like an uncorseted woman sauntering over cobblestones.”

— Saul Bellow

383. “And he makes all sorts of people feel that he has exactly what they’ve been looking for. Subtlety for the subtle. Warmth for the warm. For the crude, crudity. For the crooks, hypocrisy. Atrocity for the atrocious. Whatever your heart desires. Emotional plasma which can circulate in any system.”

— Saul Bellow

384. “The Dictator must have living crowds and also a crowd of corpses.”

— Saul Bellow

385. “No, it was me. I didn’t want to leave, but I couldn’t stay. Somebody had to take the initiative. I did. Now I’m the fall guy too.”

— Saul Bellow

386. “He said, repeating the opinion of Socrates in the Phaedrus, that a tree, so beautiful to look at, never spoke a word and that conversation was possible only in the city, between men.”

— Saul Bellow

387. “But the Jews feel that the world was created for each and every one of us, and when you destroy a human life you destroy an entire world – the world as it existed for that person.”

— Saul Bellow

388. “No court would have awarded her the amounts he paid.”

— Saul Bellow

389. “This rest and well-being were only a momentary difference in the strange lining or variable silk between life and void.”

— Saul Bellow

390. “He was an extremely correct person except that he never shaved in the morning, not caring, probably, how he looked to the fumblers and the old people and the operators and the gamblers and the idlers of Broadway uptown.”

— Saul Bellow

391. “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

392. “Rubin, the man at the newsstand, had poor eyes. They may not have been actually weak but they were poor in expression, with lacy lids that furled down at the corners.”

— Saul Bellow

393. “In every direction, the walls of life are tiled with such facts so that you can never account for them all, only note some of the more conspicuous ones.”

— Saul Bellow

394. “The lawyers – see? – draw up an agreement, and she says okay on Monday and wants more money on Tuesday. And it begins again.”

— Saul Bellow

395. “She was a bathing beauty – short, the usual breasts, hips, and smooth thighs.”

— Saul Bellow

396. “But I have had visions of judgment. I see mainly the obstinacy of cripples. We do not love ourselves, but persist in stubbornness. Each man is stubbornly, stubbornly himself.”

— Saul Bellow

397. “Forgetfully, Wilhelm traveled for miles in second gear; he was seldom in the right lane and he neither gave signals nor watched for lights.”

— Saul Bellow

398. “I know that I don’t have to be next year what I was last year. I’ve been at one end and I can get to the other. There’s no limit to what I can be. And even if I should miss being so dazzling, I know the idea of it is genuine.”

— Saul Bellow

399. “You burn the house to roast the pig.”

— Saul Bellow

400. “I will do no more to enact the peculiarities of life. This is done well enough without my special assistance.”

— Saul Bellow