Best 260 quotes of Saul Bellow on MyQuotes

... a fellow can't predict what he will pick up in the form of influence.

A fool can throw a stone in a pond that 100 wise men can not get out.

A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.

A human soul devoid of longing was a soul deformed, deprived of its highest good, sick unto death.

All a writer has to do to get a woman is to say he's a writer. It's an aphrodisiac.

All human accomplishment has the same origin, identically. Imagination is a force of nature. Is this not enough to make a person full of ecstasy? Imagination, imagination, imagination.

All human accomplishment has this same origin, identically. Imagination is a force of nature. Is this not enough to make a person full of ecstasy? Imagination, imagination, imagination! It converts to actual. It sustains, it alters, it redeems!

Also, he was smoking a cigar, and when a man is smoking a cigar, wearing a hat, he has an advantage; it is harder to find out how he feels.

Alternatives, and particularly desirable alternatives, grow only on imaginary trees.

A man may say, "From now on I'm going to speak the truth." But the truth hears him and runs away and hides before he's even done speaking.

A man must have limits and cannot give in to the wild desires to be everything and everyone and everything to everyone.

...America didn't have to fight scarcity and we all felt guilty before people who still had to struggle for bread and freedom in the old way ... We weren't starving, we weren't bugged by the police, locked up in madhouses for our ideas, arrested, deported, slave laborers sent to die in concentration camps. We were spared the holocausts and nights of terror. With our advantages we should be formulating the new basic questions for mankind. But instead we sleep. Just sleep and sleep, and eat and play and fuss and sleep again.

Americans must be the most sententious people in history. Far too busy to be religious, they have always felt that they sorely needed guidance.

A millennial belief in a Holy God may have the effect of deepening the soul, but it is also obviously archaic, and modern influences would presently bring me up to date and reveal how antiquated my origins were. To turn away from those origins, however, has always seemed to me an utter impossibility. It would be a treason to my first consciousness to un-Jew myself.

And I'm convinced that knowing the names of things braces people up.

And I said to myself that unless you conceive Death to be a violent guerrilla and kidnaper who snatches those you love, and if you are not cowardly and cannot submit to such terrorism as civilized people now do in every department of life, you must pursue and inquire and explore every possibility and seek everywhere and try everything.

... an era of turmoil and ideological confusion, the principal phenomenon of the present age.

An exchange occurs between man and woman. Love and thought complete each other in the human pair, and something like an exchange of souls takes place, according to the divine plan.

A novel is balanced between a few true impressions and the multitude of false ones that make up most of what we call life. It tells us that for every human being there is a diversity of existences, that the single existence is itself an illusion in part, that these many existences signify something, tend to something, fulfill something; it promises us meaning, harmony, and even justice.

A novel is balanced between a few true impressions and the multitude of false ones that make up most of what we call life.

Anxiety destroys scale, and suffering makes us lose perspective.

Any artist should be grateful for a naive grace which puts him beyond the need to reason elaborately.

A person either creates or destroys. There is no neutrality.

A plan relieves you of the torment of choice.

Art attempts to find in the universe, in matter as well as in the facts of life, what is fundamental, enduring, essential.

Art is order, made out of the chaos of life.

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.

As for types like my own, obscurely motivated by the conviction that our existence was worthless if we didn't make a turning point of it, we were assigned to the humanities, to poetry, philosophy, painting - the nursery games of humankind, which had to be left behind when the age of science began. The humanities would be called upon to choose a wallpaper for the crypt, as the end drew near.

Associate with the noblest people you can find; read the best books; live with the mighty; but learn to be happy alone.

At moments I dislike having a face, a nose, lips, because he has them.

A writer is a reader moved to emulation.

Because I have become such a solitary, and not in the Aristotelian sense: not a beast, not a god. Rather, a loner troubled by longings, incapable of finding a suitable language and despairing at the impossibility of composing messages in a playable key--as if I no longer understood the codes used by the estimable people who wanted to hear from me and would have so much to reply if only the impediments were taken away.

Boredom is an instrument of social control. Power is the power to impose boredom, to command stasis, to combine this stasis with anguish. The real tedium, deep tedium, is seasoned with terror and with death.

Bringing people into the here-and-now. The real universe. That's the present moment. The past is no good to us. The future is full of anxiety. Only the present is real--the here-and-now. Seize the day.

Brother raises a hand against brother and son against father (how terrible!) and the father also against son. And moreover it is a continuity-matter, for if the father did not strike the son, they would not be alike. It is done to perpetuate similarity. Oh, Henderson, man cannot keep still under the blows.... A hit B? B hit C?--we have not enough alphabet to cover the condition. A brave man will try to make the evil stop with him. He shall keep the blow. No man shall get it from him, and that is a sublime ambition.

But a man's character is his fate... and in the end there isn't any way to disguise the nature of the knocks by acoustical work on the door or gloving the knuckles.

But she's a nut, and nuts win.

California is like an artificial limb the rest of the country doesn't really need. You can quote me on that.

Can we find nothing good to say about TV? Well, yes, it brings scattered solitaries into a sort of communion. TV allows your isolated American to think that he participates in the life of the entire country. It does not actually place him in a community, but his heart is warmed with the suggestion (on the whole false) that there is a community somewhere in the vicinity and that his atomized consciousness will be drawn back toward the whole.

Certain blood will be given for half certain reasons, as in all wars.

...chaos doesn't run the whole show.

Conquered people tend to be witty.

Death deserves dignity.

Death is the dark backing a mirror needs if we are to see anything

De Tocqueville considered the impulse toward well-being as one of the strongest impulses of a democratic society. He can't be blamed for underestimating the destructive powers generated by this same impulse.

Erotic practices have become diversified. Sex used to be a single-crop farming, like cotton or wheat; now people raise all kinds of things.

Everybody knows there is no fineness or accuracy of suppression; if you hold down one thing, you hold down the adjoining.

Everybody needs his memories. They keep the wolf of insignificance from the door.

Everyone tries to create a world he can live in, and what he can't use he often can't see. But the real world is already created, and if your fabrication doesn't correspond, then even if you feel noble and insist on there being something better than what people call reality, that better something needn't try to exceed what, in its actuality, since we know it so little, may be very surprising. If a happy state of things, surprising; if miserable or tragic, no worse than what we invent.

Excuse me ... but I reject your definitions of me.