Top 450 Saul Bellow Quotes (2026 Update)
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401. “As a man sees, so he is.” The world as it appears to you classifies your mind.”

— 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. “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

405. “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

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

— Saul Bellow

407. “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

408. “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

409. “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

410. “It is better to die what you are than to live a stranger forever.”

— Saul Bellow

411. “Man is a creature who has something to say about everything under the sun.”

— Saul Bellow

412. “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

413. “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

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

— Saul Bellow

415. “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

416. “His marriage, too, had been like that. Through such decisions somehow his life had taken form. And so, from the moment when he tasted the peculiar flavor of fatality in Dr. Tamkin, he could no longer keep back the money.”

— Saul Bellow

417. “Free personalities getting no help from either deaf heaven or neutral earth were facing mortally dangerous choices which would determine the future of civilization.”

— Saul Bellow

418. “Never has any country given its people so many toys to play with or sent such highly gifted individuals to the remotest corners of idleness, as close as possible to the frontiers of pain.”

— Saul Bellow

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

— Saul Bellow

420. “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

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. “But you find people who have their luck and take the credit for it, too – all brains and personality, when all that happened was that they were handed a bucket when it rained.”

— Saul Bellow

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

— Saul Bellow

424. “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

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

— Saul Bellow

426. “They did not know how much he cared for them. No. It hurt him greatly and he blamed Margaret for turning them against him. She wanted to ruin him, while she wore the mask of kindness.”

— Saul Bellow

427. “With a little luck, you discover that the people in your life, permanently placed, are able to follow your innermost, deeply concealed motives.”

— Saul Bellow

428. “He was looking for the Knight of Faith, the real prodigy. That real prodigy, having set its relations with the infinite, was entirely at home in the finite. Able to carry the jewel of faith, making the motions of the infinite, and as a result needing nothing but the finite and the usual. Whereas others sought the extraordinary in the world. Or wished to be what was gaped at.”

— Saul Bellow

429. “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

430. “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

431. “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

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. “An old man, disappointed, of failing strength, may try to reinvigorate himself by means of anger.”

— Saul Bellow

435. “In full tumult the great afternoon current raced for Columbus Circle, where the mouth of midtown stood open and the skyscrapers gave back the yellow fire of the sun.”

— Saul Bellow

436. “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

437. “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

438. “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

439. “I may be old enough for my second childhood, but at least the first is well behind me.”

— Saul Bellow

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

— Saul Bellow

441. “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

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

— Saul Bellow

443. “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.”

— Saul Bellow

444. “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

445. “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

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

— Saul Bellow

447. “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

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

— Saul Bellow

449. “He tried to make his lust comical, to show how absurd it all was, easily the most wretched form of human struggle, the very essence of slavery.”

— Saul Bellow

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

— Saul Bellow