Top 450 Saul Bellow Quotes (2025 Update)
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401. “Everybody wanted to be what he was to the limit.”

— Saul Bellow

402. “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

403. “No one seemed satisfied, and Wilhelm was especially horrified by the cynicism of successful people. Cynicism was bread and meat to everyone And irony, too. Maybe it couldn’t be helped.”

— Saul Bellow

404. “He was a splendid old man, only partly fraudulent, and what more can you ask of anyone?”

— Saul Bellow

405. “But at least one thing became clear. To look for fulfillment in another, in interpersonal relationships, was a feminine game.”

— Saul Bellow

406. “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

407. “Looking for happiness – ought to be prepared for bad results.”

— Saul Bellow

408. “But can thought wake you from the dream of existence? Not if it becomes a second realm of confusion, another more complicated dream, the dream of intellect, the delusion of total explanations.”

— Saul Bellow

409. “Maybe the making of mistakes expressed the very purpose of his life and the essence of his being here.”

— Saul Bellow

410. “Dr. Adler surrendered his arm to the masseur, who was using wintergreen oil.”

— Saul Bellow

411. “Margaret would tell him he did not really want a divorce; he was afraid of it. He cried, “Take everything I’ve got, Margaret. Let me go to Reno. Don’t you want to marry again?” No. She went out with other men, but took his money. She lived in order to punish him.”

— Saul Bellow

412. “Well, you are a privileged character. You’re the only man living whose mother lost her mind and died.”

— Saul Bellow

413. “I got a lawyer, and she got one, too, and both of them talk and send me bills, and I eat my heart out.”

— Saul Bellow

414. “The human being, more and more oppressed by the peculiar terms of his existence – one time around for each, no more than a single life per customer – has to think of the boredom of death. O those eternities of nonexistence! For people who crave continual interest and diversity, O! how boring death will be! To live in the grave, in one place, how frightful!”

— Saul Bellow

415. “Oh, death from what we do not want is the most common of all the causes.”

— Saul Bellow

416. “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

417. “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

418. “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

419. “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

420. “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

421. “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

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

— Saul Bellow

423. “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

424. “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

425. “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

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

— Saul Bellow

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

— Saul Bellow

428. “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

429. “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

430. “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

431. “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

432. “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

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

— Saul Bellow

434. “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

435. “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

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

— Saul Bellow

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

— Saul Bellow

438. “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

439. “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

440. “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

441. “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

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

— Saul Bellow

443. “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

444. “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

445. “Slavery has never really been abolished. More people are enslaved to different things than you can shake a stick at.”

— Saul Bellow

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

— Saul Bellow

447. “As a man sees, so he is.” The world as it appears to you classifies your mind.”

— Saul Bellow

448. “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

449. “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

450. “For to be fully conscious of oneself as an individual is also to be separated from all else.”

— Saul Bellow