Top 450 Saul Bellow Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “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

352. “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

353. “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

354. “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

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

— Saul Bellow

356. “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

357. “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

358. “Those are the only two classes of people there are. Some want to live, but the great majority don’t.”

— Saul Bellow

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

— Saul Bellow

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

— Saul Bellow

361. “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

362. “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

363. “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

364. “A columnist on the Daily News said that to Ravelstein money was something you threw from the rear platform of speeding trains.”

— Saul Bellow

365. “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

366. “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

367. “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

368. “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

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

— Saul Bellow

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

— Saul Bellow

371. “Oh, my body, my body! Why have we never really got together as friends? I have loaded it with my vices, like a raft, like a barge.”

— Saul Bellow

372. “In every community there is a class of people profoundly dangerous to the rest. I don’t mean the criminals. For them we have punitive sanctions. I mean the leaders. Invariably the most dangerous people seek the power. While.”

— Saul Bellow

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

— Saul Bellow

374. “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

375. “Strict and literal truthfulness was a trivial game and might even be a disagreeable neurotic affliction.”

— Saul Bellow

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

— Saul Bellow

377. “And while the losses were small they weren’t gains, were they? They were losses. He was tired of losing, and tired also of the company, and so he had gone by himself to the movies.”

— Saul Bellow

378. “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

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

— Saul Bellow

380. “I believe Uncle’s intuition to have been that plants functioned as sense organs, collecting cosmic data for the earth itself.”

— Saul Bellow

381. “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

382. “So deformity has overtaken love and love is a power that can’t let us alone. It can’t because we owe our existence to acts of love performed before us, because love is a standing debt of the soul.”

— Saul Bellow

383. “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

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

— Saul Bellow

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

— Saul Bellow

386. “He meditated on his weakness.”

— Saul Bellow

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

— Saul Bellow

388. “Everybody wanted to be what he was to the limit.”

— Saul Bellow

389. “Mind you, I’m a great admirer of our species. I stand in awe of the genius of the race. But a large part of this genius is devoted to lying and seeming what you are not.”

— Saul Bellow

390. “Do you believe in transcendence downward as well as upward?”

— Saul Bellow

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

— Saul Bellow

392. “Hearts quaking with cheap and feeble charity or oozing potato love have not written history.”

— Saul Bellow

393. “This is the way of the weak; quiet and fair.”

— Saul Bellow

394. “More than human, can you have any use for life? Less than human, you don’t either.”

— Saul Bellow

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

— Saul Bellow

396. “And I thought there was altogether too much of this to live with. Better forget it, in part. The Ganges is there with its demons and lords; but you have a right also, and merely, to wash your feet and do your personal laundry in it. Or even if you had a good car it would take more than a lifetime to do a tour of all the Calvaries.”

— Saul Bellow

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

— Saul Bellow

398. “Death is good for some people.”

— Saul Bellow

399. “He was here to give aid, to clarify and move, and to make certain if he could that the greatness of humankind would not entirely evaporate in bourgeois well-being, et cetera. There was nothing of the average in Ravelstein’s life. He did not accept dullness and boredom. Nor was depression tolerated.”

— Saul Bellow

400. “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