Top 500 Saul Bellow Quotes (2026 Update)
Page 9 of 10

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

— Saul Bellow

402. “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

403. “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

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

— Saul Bellow

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

— Saul Bellow

406. “Death is good for some people.”

— Saul Bellow

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

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

— Saul Bellow

411. “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

412. “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

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

— Saul Bellow

414. “The soul requires intensity.”

— Saul Bellow

415. “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

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. “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

418. “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

419. “Of course, I have known for a long time that we have inherited a mad fear of being slighted or scorned, an exacerbated “honor.” It is not quite the duelist’s madness of a hundred years ago, but we are a people of tantrums nevertheless. A word exchanged in a movie or some other crowd, and we are ready to fly at one another.”

— Saul Bellow

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

— Saul Bellow

421. “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

422. “But a man doesn’t need happiness for himself. No, he can put up with any amount of torment – with recollections, with his own familiar evils, despair. And this is the unwritten history of man, his unseen, negative accomplishment, his power to do without gratification for himself provided there is something great, something into which his being, and all beings, can go. He does not need meaning as long as such intensity has scope. Because then it is self-evident; it is meaning.”

— Saul Bellow

423. “Pretpostavimo da sam ja apsolutno u pravu a da monsignor, na primjer, ima potpuno krivo. Ako sam ja u pravu, problem suvislosti svijeta, i sva odgovornost za nju, postaju moji.”

— Saul Bellow

424. “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

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

— Saul Bellow

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

— Saul Bellow

427. “As if death had tried her with his teeth and found her still unripe.”

— 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. “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

430. “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

431. “The only truly interesting side of the matter was the intimate design of the injury, the fact that it was so penetrating, custom-made exactly to your measure. It’s fascinating that hatred should be so personal as to be almost loving. The knife and the wound aching for each other. Much of course depends upon the vulnerability of the intended. Some cry out, and some swallow the thrust in silence. About the latter you could write the inner history of mankind.”

— 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. “No, the truth must be something we understand at once, without an introduction or explanation, but so common and familiar that we don’t always realize it’s around us.”

— Saul Bellow

437. “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

438. “Goethe once stated that anyone who merely increased his knowledge without at the same time showing himself what to do with it poisoned his life.”

— Saul Bellow

439. “The strength of a man’s virtue or spiritual capacity measured by his ordinary life.”

— Saul Bellow

440. “For knowledge of death makes us wish to extend our lives at the expense of others. And this is the root of the struggle for power.”

— Saul Bellow

441. “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

442. “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

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

— Saul Bellow

444. “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

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

— Saul Bellow

446. “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

447. “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

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

— Saul Bellow

449. “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

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

— Saul Bellow