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Life Quotes by Saul Bellow

64 Life quotes by Saul Bellow

All Life quotes Saul Bellow’s page

Saul Bellow observes that we are oddly put together, proud of autonomy yet often unaware of our generosity. He notes a void at life’s core, a feeling that nothing solid holds it together. He also wonders whether love should destroy us or simply teach us to live.

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“One of life’s hardest jobs, to make a quick understanding slow.”

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

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Guys like you make life easy for some women.

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“If life is not intoxicating, it's nothing. Here it's burn or rot.”

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Let the enemies of life step down.

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Unexpected intrusions of beauty. This is what life is.

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

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“The Dictator must have living crowds and also a crowd of corpses.”

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

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“A good American makes propaganda for whatever existence has forced him to become.”

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“Life, said Samuel Butler, is like giving a concert on the violin while learning to play the instrument—that, friends, is real wisdom.”

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“Mimi didn't care about secrecy. She led a proclaimed life, and once she got talking she held back nothing.”

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“The lesson of an American life like my father's... is that achievements are compatible with decency (112).”

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

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“He yelled, "Charlie, you know where I am, don't you? All right, Charlie, this isn't literature. This is life.”

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“Charlie, you know where I am, don't you? All right, Charlie, this isn't literature. This is life.”

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“Do you have feelings? There are correct and incorrect ways of indicating them. Do you have an inner life? It is nobody's…

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“But can thought wake you from the dream of existence? Not if it becomes a second realm of confusion, another more complicated…

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I am a true adorer of life, and if I can't reach as high as the face of it, I plant my…

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“He wondered at times whether he didn’t belong to a class of people secretly convinced they had an arrangement with fate; in…

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“there is a life to come – wait and see – and that in the life to come we will feel the…

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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,…

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“Oh, God,” Wilhelm prayed, “Let me out of my trouble. Let me out of my thoughts, and let me do something better…

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There is an immense, painful longing for a broader, more flexible, fuller, more coherent, more comprehensive account of what we human beings…

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Towards the end of your life you have something like a pain schedule to fill out—a long schedule like a federal document,…

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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…

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“I have begun in old age to understand just how oddly we all are put together. We are so proud of our…

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“Public life drives out private life. The more political our society becomes (in the broadest sense of ‘political’ — the obsessions, the…

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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…

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And I said to myself that unless you conceive Death to be a violent guerrilla and kidnaper who snatches those you love,…

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I have begun in old age to understand just how oddly we are all put together. We are so proud of our…

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“Well, I need a job. Something that'll leave me the free time I want." "I like the way you arrange your life.…

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“And this is what mere humanity always does. It's made up of these inventors or artists, millions and millions of them, each…

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“Anyhow, I had found something out about an unknown privation, and I realized how a general love or craving, before it is…

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“External life being so mighty, the instruments so huge and terrible, the performances so great, the thoughts so great and threatening, you…

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“I fall upon the thorns of life, I bleed. And then? I fall upon the thorns of life, I bleed. And what…

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“These, said Conrad, knew the world by systematic examination. To begin with the artist had only himself; he descended within himself and…

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

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The two real problems in life are boredom and death.

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

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More by Saul Bellow

... a fellow can't predict what he will pick up in the form of influence.

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

I have begun in old age to understand just how oddly we are all put together. We are so proud of our autonomy that…

“On Broadway it was still bright afternoon and the gassy air was almost motionless under the leaden spokes of sunlight, and sawdust footprints lay…

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

Myself is thus and so, and will continue thus and so. And why fight it? My balance comes from instability.

“A strange heart. I myself can't account for it.”

The late philosopher Morris R. Cohen of CCNY was asked by a student in the metaphysics course, Professor Cohen, how do I know that…

“Therefore we didn't talk of genuine things.”

Is our species crazy? Plenty of evidence.

“But now the emphasis has shifted to making it. People have surrendered their personal moral objectives to government or schools or psychologists. It’s a…

There's a kind of emptiness at the center of life ... nothing to form your life on, or by.

“I don't know how it all at once came to me to talk a lot, tell jokes, kick up, and suddenly have views. When…

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

“For knowledge of death makes us wish to extend our lives at the expense of others. And this is the root of the struggle…