Top 500 Saul Bellow Quotes (2026 Update)
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401. “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

402. “Even in a few minutes’ conversation, do you realize how many times what you feel is converted before it comes out as what you say?”

— Saul Bellow

403. “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

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

— Saul Bellow

405. “To tell the truth, I never had it so good, he wrote. But I lacked the strength of character to bear such joy. That was hardly a joke. When a man’s breast feels like a cage from which all the dark birds have flown – he is free, he is light. And he longs to have his vultures back again. He wants his customary struggles, his nameless, empty works, his anger, his afflictions and his sins.”

— Saul Bellow

406. “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

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

— Saul Bellow

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

— Saul Bellow

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

— Saul Bellow

410. “What actually happened? I gave up the shelter of an orderly, purposeful, lawful existence because it bored me, and I felt it was simply a slacker’s life.”

— Saul Bellow

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

— Saul Bellow

412. “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

413. “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

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

— Saul Bellow

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

— Saul Bellow

416. “The soul requires intensity.”

— Saul Bellow

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

— Saul Bellow

418. “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

419. “Ah, poor fellow! – and Herzog momentarily joined the objective world in looking down on himself. He too could smile at Herzog and despise him. But there still remained the fact. I am Herzog. I have to be that man. There is no one else to do it. After smiling, he must return to his own Self and see the thing through.”

— Saul Bellow

420. “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

421. “But then why shouldn’t he write the dead? He lived with them as much as with the living – perhaps more; and besides, his letters to the living were increasingly mental, and anyway, to the Unconscious, what was death? Dreams did not recognize it.”

— Saul Bellow

422. “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

423. “What you do know is that there is one fact of Jewish life unchanged by the creation of a Jewish state: you cannot take your right to live for granted. Others can; you cannot. This is not to say that everyone else is living pleasantly and well under a decent regime. No, it means only that the Jews, because they are Jews, have never been able to take the right to live as a natural right.”

— Saul Bellow

424. “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

425. “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

426. “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

427. “I felt singularly ashamed of not being a doctor.”

— Saul Bellow

428. “The elderly ladies were rouged and mascaraed and hennaed and used blue hair rinse and eye shadow and wore costume jewelry, and many of them were proud and stared at you with expressions that did not belong to their age.”

— Saul Bellow

429. “And what about all the good I have in my heart – doesn’t it mean anything? Is it simply a joke? A false hope that makes a man feel the illusion of worth? And so he goes on with his struggles. But this good is no phony. I know it isn’t. I swear it. Again, he was greatly excited.”

— Saul Bellow

430. “Depressives cannot surrender childhood – not even the pains of childhood.”

— Saul Bellow

431. “You had to talk with yourself in the daytime and reason with yourself at night. Who else was there to talk to in a city like New York?”

— Saul Bellow

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

— Saul Bellow

433. “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

434. “Well, for instance, what it means to be a man. In a city. In a century. In transition. In a mass. Transformed by science. Under organized power. Subject to tremendous controls. In a condition caused by mechanization. After the late failure of radical hopes. In a society that was no community and devalued the person. Owing to the multiplied power of numbers which made the self negligible.”

— Saul Bellow

435. “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

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

— Saul Bellow

437. “I know how long – endless – people’s stories are when they have grievances. And how tedious for everyone.”

— Saul Bellow

438. “But then he realized that he did not need to perform elaborate abstract intellectual work – work he had always thrown himself into as if it were the struggle for survival. But not thinking is not necessarily fatal. Did I really believe that I would die when thinking stopped? Now to fear such a thing – that’s really crazy.”

— Saul Bellow

439. “But I’m thinking of the great death populations of the Gulags and the German labor camps. Why does the century – I don’t know how else to put it – underwrite so much destruction? There is a lameness that comes over all of us when we consider these facts.”

— Saul Bellow

440. “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

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

— Saul Bellow

442. “The challenge of modern freedom, or the combination of isolation and freedom which confronts you, is to make yourself up. The danger is that you may emerge from the process as a not-entirely-human creature.”

— Saul Bellow

443. “Why should one man have the power to damage all nature or pollute the entire world?”

— Saul Bellow

444. “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

445. “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

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

— Saul Bellow

447. “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

448. “That’s right. That was bad. Especially winters. You should have had more sense. That house made a prisoner of her. It must have been just dreary, washing and cooking, and to have to hush the baby, or you’d raise hell, she said. You couldn’t think when June was crying, and you’d rush from your room hollering.” “Yes, I was stupid – a blockhead.”

— Saul Bellow

449. “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

450. “You’re very sympathetic, even the young girls feel that. You’d make a good provider. But they go more for the other types.”

— Saul Bellow