Quotes by Saul Bellow

“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.”

“A man is only as good as what he loves.”

“Unexpected intrusions of beauty. This is what life is.”

“You have to have the power to employ pain, to repent, to be illuminated, you must have the opportunity and even the time.”

“I discovered, however, in the early days of our marriage that, in having her way, she put my interests ahead of her own.”

“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.”

“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...”

“I see that I've become a really bad correspondent. It's not that I don't think of you. You come into my thoughts often. But when you do it appears to me that I owe you a particularly grand letter. ...”

“The old continued to have one resurgence of foolishness after another, until the organism gave out altogether.”

“But then why shouldn't he write the dead? He lived with them as much as with the living - perhaps more; and besides, his letters to the living were increasingly mental, and anyway, to the Unconscio...”

“The challenge of modern freedom, or the combination of isolation and freedom which confronts you, is to make yourself up. The danger is that you may emerge from the process as a not-entirely-human ...”

“As the wicked flee when none pursueth, so does the middle-class wrestle when none contendeth. They cried out for freedom, it came down on them in a flood. Nothing remains but a few floating timbers...”

“If I'm out of my mind, it's all right with me, thought Moses Herzog.”

“Moses loved his relatives quite openly and even helplessly . . . It was childish of him; he knew that. He could only sigh at himself, that he should be so undeveloped on that significant side of hi...”

“He was looking for the Knight of Faith, the real prodigy. That real prodigy, having set its relations with the infinite, was entirely at home in the finite. Able to carry the jewel of faith, making...”

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

“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 pe...”

“Society is what beats me. Alone I can be pretty good, but let me go among people and theres the devil to pay.”

“One thought-murder a day keeps the psychiatrist away.”

“Some people embrace their gifts with gratitude. Others have no use for them and can think only of overcoming their weaknesses. Only their defects interest and challenge them. Thus those who hate pe...”