Saul Bellow Quotes
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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.
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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.
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Whoever wants to reach a distant goal must take small steps.
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Great pressure is brought to bear to make us undervalue ourselves. On the other hand, civilization teaches that each of us is an inestimable prize. There are, then, these two preparations: one for life and the other for death. Therefore we value and are ashamed to value ourselves.
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Do we always, always to the point of misery, do a thing?
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We mustn't forget how quickly the visions of genius become the canned goods of intellectuals.
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... an era of turmoil and ideological confusion, the principal phenomenon of the present age.
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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.
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The modern reader (or viewer, or listener: let's include everybody) is perilously overloaded. His attention is, to use the latest lingo,'targeted' by powerful forces? Our consciousness is a staging area, a field of operations for all kinds of enterprises, which make free use of it.
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It seems, after all that there are no nonpeculiar people.
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Some people, if they didn't make it hard for themselves, might fall asleep.
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Americans must be the most sententious people in history. Far too busy to be religious, they have always felt that they sorely needed guidance.
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It's not up to me ... to make the world consistent.
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When I didn't argue he was satisfied he had persuaded me, and was not the first to make that mistake.
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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.
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In the greatest confusion there is still an open channel to the soul. It may be difficult to find because by midlife it is overgrown, and some of the wildest thickets that surround it grow out of what we describe as our education. But the channel is always there, and it is our business to keep it open, to have access to the deepest part of ourselves.
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California is like an artificial limb the rest of the country doesn't really need. You can quote me on that.
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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.
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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.
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People don't realize how much they are in the grip of ideas. We live among ideas much more than we live in nature.
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In an age of madness, to expect to be untouched by madness is a form of madness. But the pursuit of sanity can be a form of madness, too
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If women are expected to do the same work as men, we must teach them the same things.
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But privately when things got very bad I often looked into books to see whether I could find some helpful words, and one day I read, "The forgiveness of sins is perpetual and righteousness first is not required." This impressed me so deeply that I went around saying it to myself. But then I forgot which book it was.
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A novel is balanced between a few true impressions and the multitude of false ones that make up most of what we call life.