Books Quote by Saul Bellow

““We never learn anything, never in the world, and in spite of all the history books written. They’re just the way we plead or ague with ourselves about it, but it’s only light from the outside that we’re supposed to take inside. If we can. There’s a regular warehouse of fine suggestions and if we’re not better it isn’t because there aren’t plenty of marvelous and true ideas to draw on, but because our vanity weighs more than all of them put together.””

Saul Bellow

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More by Saul Bellow

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

Saul Bellow

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

Saul Bellow

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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 autonomy that we seldom if ever realize how generous we are to ourselves, and just how stingy with others. One of the booby traps of freedomwhich is bordered on all sides by isolationis that we think so well…

Saul Bellow

“On Broadway it was still bright afternoon and the gassy air was almost motionless under the leaden spokes of sunlight, and sawdust footprints lay about the doorways of butcher shops and fruit stores. And the great, great crowd, the inexhaustible current of millions of every race and kind pouring out, pressing round, of every race and genius, possessors of every…

Saul Bellow

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

Saul Bellow

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

Saul Bellow

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

Saul Bellow

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

Saul Bellow

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

Saul Bellow

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Is our species crazy? Plenty of evidence.

Saul Bellow

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“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 change that accelerated with the boom after the war. . . . There has been a surrender to pragmatism; the true is what makes you successful and the false is what makes you fail. But I…

Saul Bellow