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Top 450 Saul Bellow Quotes (2025 Update)
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Saul Bellow Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “Reality instructors. They want to teach you – to punish you with – the lessons of the Real.”
Saul Bellow Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “I will do no more to enact the peculiarities of life. This is done well enough without my special assistance.”
Saul Bellow Quote: “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 Quote: “Nature is a deep imitator. And as man is the prince of organisms he is master of adaptations. He is the artist of suggestions. He himself is his principle work of art, in the body working in the flesh. What miracle! What triumph! Also, what a disaster! What tears are to be shed!”
Saul Bellow Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “A columnist on the Daily News said that to Ravelstein money was something you threw from the rear platform of speeding trains.”
Saul Bellow Quote: “He was the obscure failure of an aggressive and powerful clan.”
Saul Bellow Quote: “Affable! His own son, his one and only son, could not speak his mind or ease his heart to him.”
Saul Bellow Quote: “He meditated on his weakness.”
Saul Bellow Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “But oh, unreality! Unreality, unreality! That has been my scheme for a troubled but eternal life.”
Saul Bellow Quote: “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 Quote: “Because of unhappiness, at a certain age, the brain starts to die back.”
Saul Bellow Quote: “Roumanian is an easy language. You just add a tl to everything.”
Saul Bellow Quote: “You see, I understand what it is when the lonely person begins to feel like an animal.”
Saul Bellow Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “His friend, his former friend, Valentine, and his wife, his ex-wife Madeleine, had spread the rumor that his sanity had collapsed.”
Saul Bellow Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “Anyone who wants to govern the country, has to entertain it.”
Saul Bellow Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “You burn the house to roast the pig.”
Saul Bellow Quote: “Hearts quaking with cheap and feeble charity or oozing potato love have not written history.”
Saul Bellow Quote: “Is it faith? Or is it simply childishness, expecting to be loved for doing your bidden task? It is, if you’re looking for the psychological explanation, childish and classically depressive.”
Saul Bellow Quote: “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 Quote: “She liked to give the example of Whistler the painter when he was taken to task by a woman who said, “I never see trees like that.” He told her, “No, ma’am, but don’t you wish you could?” This could be a variation on “Ye have eyes and see not,” an aesthete’s version of it.”
Saul Bellow Quote: “Do you believe in transcendence downward as well as upward?”
Saul Bellow Quote: “My very fingertips rehearsed how they would work the keys of the trumpet, imagination’s trumpet, when I got ready to blow it at last. The peals of that brass would be heard beyond the earth, out in space itself. When that Messiah, that savior faculty the imagination was roused, finally we could look again with open eyes upon the whole shining earth.”
Saul Bellow Quote: “But such vexations always filled me with energy as well. And if I later became such a formidable mass of credentials it was because I put such slights to good use. I avenged myself by making progress.”
Saul Bellow Quote: “Slavery has never really been abolished. More people are enslaved to different things than you can shake a stick at.”
Saul Bellow Quote: “As a man sees, so he is.” The world as it appears to you classifies your mind.”
Saul Bellow Quote: “She has two husbands. Whose are the kids? The fellow detected her and she gave a signed confession that two of the four children were not the father’s.”
Saul Bellow Quote: “She just has fixed herself on me to kill me. She can do it at long distance. One of these days I’ll be struck down by suffocation or apoplexy because of her.”
Saul Bellow Quote: “For to be fully conscious of oneself as an individual is also to be separated from all else.”
Saul Bellow Quote: “Is it an easier farewell for Dad if we don’t part friends?”
Saul Bellow Quote: “Wait a minute, though: Sammler denied himself the privilege of the high-principled intellectual who must always be applying the purest standards and thumping the rest of his species on the head. When he tried to imagine a just social order, he could not do it. A non-corrupt society? He could not do that either. There were no revolutions that he could remember which had not been made for justice, freedom, and pure goodness. Their last state was always more nihilistic than the first.”
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