Saul bellow quotes

When the striving ceases, there is life waiting as a gift.

I have begun in old age to understand...that we seldom if ever realize how generous we are to ourselves, and just how stingy with others.

Unfortunately for the betterment of mankind it is not always the fair-minded who are in the right.

There is only one way to defeat the enemy, and that is to write as well as one can. The best argument is an undeniably good book.

A writer is in the broadest sense a spokesman of his community. Through him that community comes to know its heart. Without such knowledge, how long can it survive?

We are always looking for the book it is necessary to read next.

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.

With one long breath, caught and held in his chest, he fought his sadness over his solitary life. Don't cry, you idiot! Live or die, but don't poison everything.

Goodness is achieved not in a vacuum, but in the company of other men, attended by love.

You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.

The body, she says, is subject to the force of gravity. But the soul is ruled by levity, pure.

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

To tell the truth I never had it so good. But I lacked the strength of character to bear such joy.

Language is a spiritual mansion in which you live and nobody has the right to evict you.

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

It seems, after all that there are no nonpeculiar people.

Human character is smaller now, people don't have durable passions; they've replaced passions with excitement.

The late philosopher Morris R. Cohen of CCNY was asked by a student in the metaphysics course, Professor Cohen, how do I know that I exist? The keen old prof replied, And who is asking?

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.

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

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

The spirit knows that its growth is the real aim of existence.

...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.

It's no disgrace to be a private, you know. Socrates was a plain foot soldier, a hoplite.

I think that art has something to do with an arrest of attention in the midst of distraction.

I blame myself for not often enough seeing the extraordinary in the ordinary. Somewhere in his journals, Dostoyevky remarks that a writer can begin anywhere, at the most commonplace thing, scratch around in it long enough, pry and dig away long enough, and lo!, soon he will hit upon the marvelous.

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

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!

I love solitude, but I prize it most when plenty of company is available.

We mustn't forget how quickly the visions of genius become the canned goods of intellectuals.

For the first time in history, the human species as a whole has gone into politics. Everyone is in the act, and there is no telling what may come of it.

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

The best and purest human beings, from the beginning of time, have understood that life is sacred.

...there is no old age of the soul.

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.

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.

I am an American, Chicago born – Chicago, that somber city – and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent. But a man's character is his fate, says Heraclitus, 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.

Conquered people tend to be witty.

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

The two real problems in life are boredom and death.

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.

If I had a child of school age, I would send him to one of the Waldorf Schools.

Open discussion of many major public questions has for some time now been taboo. We can't open our mouths without being denounced as racists, misogynists, supremacists, imperialists or fascists. As for the media, they stand ready to trash anyone so designated.

One thought-murder a day keeps the psychiatrist away.

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.

It is a joy to be choked with thought.

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.

The stillness in art characterizes prayer, and the eye of the storm.

The main reason for rewriting is not to achieve a smooth surface, but to discover the inner truth of your characters.

Hapiness can only be found if you can free yourself of all other distractions.

When I didn't argue he was satisfied he had persuaded me, and was not the first to make that mistake.

With a novelist, like a surgeon, you have to get a feeling that you've fallen into good hands - someone from whom you can accept the anesthetic with confidence.

I am moneys medium. It passes through me- taxes, insurance, mortgage, child support, rent, legal fees. All this dignified blundering costs plenty.

A man is only as good as what he loves.

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

You can spend the entire second half of your life recovering from the mistakes of the first half.

Losing a parent is something like driving through a plate-glass window. You didn't know it was there until it shattered, and then for years to come you're picking up the pieces -- down to the last glassy splinter.

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.

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

I am more stupid about some things than others; not equally stupid in all directions; I am not a well-rounded person.

I'm glad I haven't lived in vain.

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.

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

I feel that art has something to do with the achievement of stillness in the midst of chaos. A stillness which characterizes prayer, too, and the eye of the storm. I think that art has something to do with an arrest of attention in the midst of distraction.

Strict seriousness was far more dangerous than any joke.

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.

You have to fight for your life. That's the chief condition on which you hold it.

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.

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.

I am a phoenix who runs after arsonists.

A plan relieves you of the torment of choice.

(Socrates) said there were only two possibilities. Either the soul is immortal or, after death, things would be again as blank as they were before we were born.

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.

Let the enemies of life step down.

Anxiety destroys scale, and suffering makes us lose perspective.

She was what we used to call a suicide blonde - dyed by her own hand.

Our society, like decadent Rome, has turned into an amusement society, with writers chief among the court jesters

People can lose their lives in libraries. They ought to be warned.

In every community there is a class of people profoundly dangerous to the rest. I don't mean the criminals. For them we have punitive sanctions. I mean the leaders. Invariably the most dangerous people seek the power. While in the parlors of indignation the right-thinking citizen brings his heart to a boil. (p. 51)

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

Is our species crazy? Plenty of evidence.

We are all such accidents. We do not make up history and culture. We simply appear, not by our own choice. We make what we can of our condition with the means available. We must accept the mixture as we find it - the impurity of it, the tragedy of it, the hope of it.

I would like to explain that I consider prayer above all an act of gratitude for existence.

Well, everybody has a history.

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

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.

Whoever wants to reach a distant goal must take small steps.

The fact that there are so many weak, poor and boring stories and novels written and published in America has been ascribed by our rebels to the horrible squareness of our institutions, the idiocy of power, the debasement of sexual instincts, and the failure of writers to be alienated enough. The poems and novels of these same rebellious spirits, and their theoretical statements, are grimy and gritty and very boring too, besides being nonsensical, and it is evident by now that polymorphous sexuality and vehement declarations of alienation are not going to produce great works of art either.

Readiness to answer all questions is the infallible sign of stupidity.

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.

What Homo sapien imagines, he may slowly convert himself to.

How should I know why! I didn't invent human beings, Iggy.

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.

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

A man should be able to hear, and to bear, the worst that could be said of him.

The soul has to find and hold its ground against hostile forces, sometimes embodied in ideas which frequently deny its very existence, and which indeed often seem to be trying to annul it altogether.

Retirement is an illusion. Not a reward but a mantrap. The bankrupt underside of success. A shortcut to death. Golf courses are too much like cemeteries.

I've never turned over a fig leaf yet that didn't have a price tag on the other side.

It's goodbye to reality when love sets in.

I don’t actually take much stock in the collapsing culture bit. I’m beginning to see it instead as the conduct of life without input from your soul.

The physical body is an agent of the spirit and its mirror. It is an engine and a reflection of the spirit. It is the spirit's ingenious memorandum to itself and the spirit sees itself in my body, just as I see my own face in a looking glass. My nerves reflect this. The earth is literally a mirror of thoughts. Objects themselves are embodied thoughts. Death is the dark backing that a mirror needs if we are to see anything.

We take foreigners to be incomplete Americans -- convinced that we must help and hasten their evolution.

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.

Take our politicians: they're a bunch of yo-yos. The presidency is now a cross between a popularity contest and a high school debate, with an encyclopedia of cliches.

Live or die but don't poison everything.

There is much to be said for exotic marriages. If your husband is a bore, it takes years longer to discover.

Unexpected intrusions of beauty. This is what life is.

Boredom is the conviction that you can't change ... the shriek of unused capacities.

How could I be anything but a dissenter? Who wants the opinion of a group?

There are times when the most practical thing is to lie down.

Death is the black backing on the mirror that allows us to see anything at all.

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.

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.

Writers are greatly respected. The intelligent public is wonderfully patient with them, continues to read them, and endures disappointment after disappointment, waiting to hear from art what it does not hear from theology, philosophy, social theory, and what it cannot hear from pure science. Out of the struggle at the center has come 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.

People don't realize how much they are in the grip of ideas. We live among ideas much more than we live in nature.

There are evils that have the ability to survive identification and go on for ever... money, for instance, or war.

When we ask for advice, we are usually looking for an accomplice.

I've discovered that rejections are not altogether a bad thing. They teach a writer to rely on his own judgment and to say in his heart of hearts, 'To hell with you.'

Towards the end of your life you have something like a pain schedule to fill out - a long schedule like a federal document, only it's your pain schedule. Endless categories. First, physical causes - like arthritis, gallstones, menstrual cramps. New category, injured vanity, betrayal, swindle, injustice. But the hardest items of all have to do with love. The question then is: So why does everybody persist? If love cuts them up so much.

Love is the most potent cosmetic.

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.

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

I feel that art has something to do with the achievement of stillness in the midst of chaos.

The first undressing of two lovers is a most special event.