Top 450 Saul Bellow Quotes (2024 Update)
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401. “I know how long – endless – people’s stories are when they have grievances. And how tedious for everyone.”

— Saul Bellow

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

— Saul Bellow

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

— Saul Bellow

404. “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

405. “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

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

— Saul Bellow

407. “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

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

— Saul Bellow

409. “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

410. “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

411. “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

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

— Saul Bellow

413. “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

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

— Saul Bellow

415. “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

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

— Saul Bellow

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

— Saul Bellow

418. “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

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

— Saul Bellow

420. “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

421. “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

422. “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

423. “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

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

— Saul Bellow

425. “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

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

— Saul Bellow

427. “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

428. “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

429. “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

430. “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

431. “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

432. “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

433. “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

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

— Saul Bellow

435. “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

436. “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

437. “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

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

— Saul Bellow

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

— Saul Bellow

440. “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

441. “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

442. “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

443. “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

444. “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

445. “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

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

— Saul Bellow

447. “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

448. “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

449. “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

450. “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