Saul Bellow Quotes
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You have to fight for your life. That's the chief condition on which you hold it.
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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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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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A human soul devoid of longing was a soul deformed, deprived of its highest good, sick unto death.
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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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A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.
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The dream of man's heart ... is that life may complete in significant pattern.
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We are funny creatures. We don't see the stars as they are, so why do we love them? They are not small gold objects, but endless fire.
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A man must have limits and cannot give in to the wild desires to be everything and everyone and everything to everyone.
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Here we write well when we expose frauds and hypocrites. We are great at counting warts and blemishes and weighting feet of clay. In expressing love, we belong among the underdeveloped countries.
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And I'm convinced that knowing the names of things braces people up.
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It's usually the selfish people who are loved the most. They do what you deny yourself, and you love them for it. You give them your heart.
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Those who have a why to live for can bear almost any how. The necessary premise is that a person is somehow more than his or her "characteristics," all the emotions, strivings, tastes, and constructions which it pleases us to call "My Life." We have grounds to hope that a Life is something more than a cloud of particles, mere facticity. Go through what is comprehensible and you conclude that only the incomprehensible gives any light.
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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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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.
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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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I am a phoenix who runs after arsonists.
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Art attempts to find in the universe, in matter as well as in the facts of life, what is fundamental, enduring, essential.
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I am an American – Chicago born.
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At moments I dislike having a face, a nose, lips, because he has them.
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...chaos doesn't run the whole show.
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You have one of two choices. Either you can panic and start making frantic attempts to reform under the glare of these awful critical eyes, or you can just say, "The hell with you! I know what I'm doing. If you don't yet, it's because you haven't given me an attentive reading.
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A man should be able to hear, and to bear, the worst that could be said of him.
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Death deserves dignity.