Saul Bellow Quotes
-
One of the booby traps of freedom - which is bordered on all sides by isolation - is that we think so well of ourselves. I now see that I have helped myself to the best cuts at life's banquet.
-
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.
-
There's a kind of emptiness at the center of life ... nothing to form your life on, or by.
-
In an age of enormities, the emotions are naturally weakened. We are continually called upon to have feelings - about genocide, for instance, or about famine or the blowing up of passenger planes - and we are all aware that we are incapable of reacting appropriately. A guilty consciousness of emotional inadequacy or impotence makes people doubt their own human weight.
-
California is like an artificial limb the rest of the country doesn't really need. You can quote me on that.
-
What Homo sapien imagines, he may slowly convert himself to.
-
We mustn't forget how quickly the visions of genius become the canned goods of intellectuals.
-
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.
-
He believed that he must, that he could and would recover the good things, the happy things, the easy tranquil things of life. He had made mistakes, but he could overlook these. He had been a fool, but that could be forgiven. The time wasted--must be relinquished. What else could one do about it? Things were too complex, but they might be reduced to simplicity again. Recovery was possible.
-
The first undressing of two lovers is a most special event.
-
When I didn't argue he was satisfied he had persuaded me, and was not the first to make that mistake.
-
I immersed myself in The Periodic Table gladly and gratefully. There is nothing superfluous here, everything this book contains is essential. It is wonderful pure, and beautifully translated...I was deeply impressed.
-
Certain blood will be given for half certain reasons, as in all wars.
-
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.
-
People don't realize how much they are in the grip of ideas. We live among ideas much more than we live in nature.
-
Excuse me ... but I reject your definitions of me.
-
Socrates said the unexamined life is not worth living. But the over-examined life makes you wish you were dead. Given the alternative, I'd rather be living.
-
I must play the instrument I've got.
-
The two real problems in life are boredom and death.
-
If I'm out of my mind, it's all right with me, thought Moses Herzog.
-
A plan relieves you of the torment of choice.
-
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.
-
Whoever wants to reach a distant goal must take small steps.
-
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.