Top 100 Saul Bellow Quotes
#1. It's goodbye to reality when love sets in.
Saul Bellow
#2. It was probably no accident that it was the cripple Hephaestus who made ingenious machines; a normal man didn't have to hoist or jack himself over hindrances by means of cranks, chains and metal parts. Then it was in the line of human advance that Einhorn could do so much.
Saul Bellow
#3. Art is order, made out of the chaos of life.
Saul Bellow
#4. Society is what beats me. Alone I can be pretty good, but let me go among people and there's the devil to pay.
Saul Bellow
#5. There is something funny about the human condition, and civilized intelligence makes fun of its own ideas.
Saul Bellow
#6. It's not up to me ... to make the world consistent.
Saul Bellow
#7. The life of every citizen is becoming a business. This, it seems to me, is one of the worst interpretations of the meaning of human life history has ever seen. Man's life is not a business.
Saul Bellow
#8. He yelled, Charlie, you know where I am, don't you? All right, Charlie, this isn't literature. This is life.
Saul Bellow
#9. But maybe time was invented so that misery might have an end. So that it shouldn't last forever? There may be something in this. And bliss, just the opposite, is eternal? There is no time in bliss. All the clocks were thrown out of heaven.
Saul Bellow
#10. A human soul devoid of longing was a soul deformed, deprived of its highest good, sick unto death.
Saul Bellow
#11. It's no small matter to become rich and famous by saying exactly what you think - to say it in your own words, without compromise.
Saul Bellow
#12. Whenever I write a dramatic poem I can't understand why the characters should ever want to be anything but poets themselves.
Saul Bellow
#13. That's so often what it is with machinery: be somewhat in doubt and it carries the decision.
Saul Bellow
#14. The sand swallows burst out of their scupper holes in the bluffs and out over the transparent drown of the water, back again to the white, to the brown, to the black, from moving to stock-still sand waves and water-worked woods and roots that hugged and twisted in the sun.
Saul Bellow
#15. Unfortunately for the betterment of mankind it is not always the fair-minded who are in the right.
Saul Bellow
#16. Alternatives, and particularly desirable alternatives, grow only on imaginary trees.
Saul Bellow
#17. Is the carbon molecule lined with thought?
Saul Bellow
#18. Oh yes, I got up on my hindlegs like an orator and sounded off to everyone.
Saul Bellow
#19. Depressives cannot surrender childhood
not even the pains of childhood.
Saul Bellow
#20. These were his friends of the business community; a man in business had to have such, and he visited and entertained but neither touched nor was touched, ever.
Saul Bellow
#21. An era of turmoil and ideological confusion, the principal phenomenon of the present age.
Saul Bellow
#22. Even if I am not the honestest type in the world I don't want to lie more than is average.
Saul Bellow
#24. The only real distinction at this dangerous moment in human history and cosmic development has nothing to do with medals and ribbons. Not to fall asleep is distinguished. Everything else is mere popcorn.
Saul Bellow
#25. The terms which, in his inmost heart, each man knows. As I know mine. As all know. For that is the truth of it - that we all know, God, that we know, that we know, we know, we know.
Saul Bellow
#26. As the victim of those impulses she must be looking in the paper for his obituary.
Saul Bellow
#27. There is an immense, painful longing for a broader, more flexible, fuller, more coherent, more comprehensive account of what we human beings are, who we are, and what this life is for.
Saul Bellow
#28. God may save all, but human rescue is only for a few.
Saul Bellow
#29. Still women- women. They do themselves more credit, there's more reality in women. They live closer to their nature. They have to. It's more with them. They have the breasts. They see their blood, and it does them good, while men are led to be vainer.
Saul Bellow
#30. But fathers are soft on daughters. Look how Dad favors Angela. He gave her ten times more. Because she reminded him of Mae West. He was always smiling at her boobs. He wasn't aware of it. Mother and I saw it.
Saul Bellow
#31. Whoever wants to reach a distant goal must take small steps.
Saul Bellow
#32. When I didn't argue he was satisfied he had persuaded me, and was not the first to make that mistake.
Saul Bellow
#33. Certain blood will be given for half certain reasons, as in all wars.
Saul Bellow
#34. You have to have the power to employ pain, to repent, to be illuminated, you must have the opportunity and even the time.
Saul Bellow
#35. A man is only as good as what he loves.
Saul Bellow
#36. It would not be practical for her to hate herself. Luckily, God sends a substitute, a husband.
Saul Bellow
#37. It never seems to occur to such "criminals" that to behave with decency to another human being might also be "gratuitous.
Saul Bellow
#38. What do women really want? They eat green salad and drink human blood.
Saul Bellow
#39. I wish my dead days would quit bothering me and leave me alone. The bad stuff keeps coming back, and it's the worst rhythm there is. The repetition of a man's bad self, that's the worst suffering that's ever been known.
Saul Bellow
#40. I don't think the struggles of desire can ever be won. Ages of longing and willing, willing and longing, and how have they ended? In a draw, dust and dust.
Saul Bellow
#41. A fellow can't predict what he will pick up in the form of influence.
Saul Bellow
#42. History, memory - that is what makes us human, that, and our knowledge of death: 'by man came death'. 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
#43. The good die young, but I have been spared to build myself up so that I may end my life as good as gold. The senior dead will be proud of me ... I will join the Y.M.C.A. of the immortals. Only, in this very hour, I may be missing eternity.
Saul Bellow
#44. Some people, if they didn't make it hard for themselves, might fall asleep.
Saul Bellow
#45. I want to tell you, don't marry suffering. Some people do. They get married to it, and sleep and eat together, just as husband and wife. If they go with joy they think it's adultery.
Saul Bellow
#46. Only self-hatred could lead him to ruin himself because his heart was broken.
Saul Bellow
#47. To tell the truth I never had it so good. But I lacked the strength of character to bear such joy.
Saul Bellow
#48. There is simply too much to think about.
Saul Bellow
#49. Just because your soul is being torn to pieces doesn't mean that you stop analyzing the phenomena.
Saul Bellow
#51. He knew he would think better clearer thoughts after bathing in the sea. His mother had believed in the good effects of bathing, but she had died so young.
Saul Bellow
#52. At moments I dislike having a face, a nose, lips, because he has them.
Saul Bellow
#53. A novel is balanced between a few true impressions and the multitude of false ones that make up most of what we call life.
Saul Bellow
#54. My God! Who is this creature? It considers itself human.
Saul Bellow
#55. What Homo sapien imagines, he may slowly convert himself to.
Saul Bellow
#57. Psychoanalysis pretends to investigate the Unconscious. The Unconscious by definition is what you are not conscious of. But the Analysts already know what's in it - they should, because they put it all in beforehand.
Saul Bellow
#58. Many common lies and hypocrisies are like that, just out of the harmony of the moment.
Saul Bellow
#59. I would as lief look upon a piece of pastrami-stained paper as on the face of Alfred Kazin.
Saul Bellow
#60. When we ask for advice, we are usually looking for an accomplice
Saul Bellow
#61. I don't like to write from a flat, cold position. You must like what you're doing very much or like the people
either like them or hate them. You can't be indifferent.
Saul Bellow
#62. It's wasted on dummies." (Life is). "They give it to dummies and fools.
Saul Bellow
#63. First these people murdered you, then they forced you to brood over their crimes.
Saul Bellow
#64. In the end you can't save your soul and life by thought. But if you think, the least of the consolation prizes is the world.
Saul Bellow
#65. Art
the fresh feeling, new harmony, the transforming magic which by means of myth brings back the scattered distracted soul from its modern chaos
art, not politics, is the remedy.
Saul Bellow
#66. I am something of a crank about sleep, for if I get seven and a quarter hours instead of eight I feel afflicted and drag myself around, although there's nothing really wrong with me. It's just another idea. That's how it is with my ideas; they seem to get strong while I weaken.
Saul Bellow
#67. When the striving ceases, there is life waiting as a gift.
Saul Bellow
#68. If you could arrange to avoid that routine job-world, you were an intellectual or an artist. Too restless, tremorous, agitated, too mad to sit at a desk eight hours a day, you needed an institution - a higher institution.
Saul Bellow
#69. There haven't been civilizations without cities. But what about cities without civilizations? An inhuman thing, if possible, to have so many people together who beget nothing on one another. No, but it is not possible, and the dreary begets its own fire, and so this never happens.
Saul Bellow
#70. In Los Angeles all the loose objects in the country were collected, as if America had been tilted and everything that wasn't tightly screwed down had slid into Southern California.
Saul Bellow
#71. Every treasure is guarded by dragons. That's how you can tell it's valuable.
Saul Bellow
#73. Myself is thus and so, and will continue thus and so. And why fight it? My balance comes from instability.
Saul Bellow
#76. The flesh would shrink and go, the blood would dry, but no one believes in his mind of minds or heart of hearts that the pictures do stop.
Saul Bellow
#77. You're used to difficult women. To struggle. Perhaps you like it when they give you a bad time." "Every treasure is guarded by dragons. That's how you can tell it's valuable. ... Do you mind if I unbutton my collar? It seems to be pressing on an artery.
Saul Bellow
#78. Nobody asks you to love the whole world, only to be honest, ehrlich. Don't have a loud mouth. The more you love people the more they'll mix you up. A child loves, a person respects. Respect is better than love.
Saul Bellow
#79. A person either creates or destroys. There is no neutrality.
Saul Bellow
#80. Fun comes hard - like, alas, its prarens, pleasure and happiness, whom we have to pursue.
Saul Bellow
#82. You never know what forms self-respect will take, especially with people whose rules of life are few.
Saul Bellow
#83. The noise of the world is so terrible that we can endure it only by being coated with sleep.
Saul Bellow
#84. His mind took one of its odd jumps. He opened a clean page in his grimy notebook, and in the twig-divided shade of a wild cherry, infested with tent caterpillars, he began to make notes for a poem.
Saul Bellow
#85. Apes in their own habitat are less sexually driven than those in captivity. It must be that captivity, boredom, breeds lustfulness.
Saul Bellow
#86. You do all you can to humanize and familiarize the world, and suddenly it becomes more strange than ever. The living are not what they were, the dead die again and again, and at last for good.
Saul Bellow
#87. And where was that day? Past and dead. Whose humiliating memories were these? His and not his father's. What had he to think back on that he could call good? Very, very little. You had to forgive. First, to forgive yourself, and then, general forgiveness.
Saul Bellow
#88. A writer is a reader moved to emulation.
Saul Bellow
#89. . . . Nietzche himself had a Christian view of history, seeing the present moment always as some crisis, some fall from classical greatness, some corruption or evil to be saved from.
Saul Bellow
#90. I always suspected of him that he had in some fashion discovered that there were ways in which to be human was unutterably dismal, and that all his life was given over to avoiding those ways.
Saul Bellow
#91. The more realistic you are the more you threaten the grounds of your own art.
Saul Bellow
#92. You have, like the external world, your own phenomena inside.
Saul Bellow
#93. The old continued to have one resurgence of foolishness after another, until the organism gave out altogether.
Saul Bellow
#94. I am willing without further exercise in pain to open my heart. And this needs no doctrine or theology of suffering. We love apocalypses too much, and crisis ethics and florid extremism with its thrilling language. Excuse me, no. I've had all the monstrosity I want.
Saul Bellow
#95. 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.
(Referenced in How to Lose Friends and Alienate People by Toby Young)
Saul Bellow
#96. Her hips were long and narrow, her bust was large, and she wore close-fitting skirts and sweaters and high heels that gave a tight arch of impatience to the muscles of her calves; her step was small and pretty and her laughter violent, total, and critical.
Saul Bellow
#97. No school without spectacular eccentrics and crazy hearts is worth attending.
Saul Bellow
#98. Moses loved his relatives quite openly and even helplessly . . . It was childish of him; he knew that. He could only sigh at himself, that he should be so undeveloped on that significant side of his nature.
Saul Bellow
#99. A man must have limits and cannot give in to the wild desires to be everything and everyone and everything to everyone.
Saul Bellow
#100. I am not an ornithologist - I am a bird.
Saul Bellow
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