Saul Bellow - People Quotes

18 Sourced Quotes

View all Saul Bellow Quotes
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.

Saul Bellow
And I'm convinced that knowing the names of things braces people up.

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

Saul Bellow
Americans must be the most sententious people in history. Far too busy to be religious, they have always felt that they sorely needed guidance.

Saul Bellow
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.

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

Saul Bellow
People reserve their best thinking for their professional specialties and, next in line, for serious matters confronting the alert citizen —economics, politics, the disposal of nuclear waste, etc. The day's work done, they want to be entertained.

Saul Bellow
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.

Saul Bellow
It seems hard for the American people to believe that anything could be more exciting than the times themselves. What we read daily and view on the TV has thrust imagined forms into the shadow. We are staggeringly rich in facts, in things, and perhaps, like the nouveau riche of other ages, we want our wealth faithfully reproduced by the artist.

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.

Saul Bellow
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.

Saul Bellow
And I said to myself that unless you conceive Death to be a violent guerrilla and kidnaper who snatches those you love, and if you are not cowardly and cannot submit to such terrorism as civilized people now do in every department of life, you must pursue and inquire and explore every possibility and seek everywhere and try everything.

Saul Bellow
Some people, if they didn't make it hard for themselves, might fall asleep.

Saul Bellow
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 creature. (Referenced in How to Lose Friends and Alienate People by Toby Young)

Saul Bellow
One way or another the no doubt mad idea entered my mind that my own actions had historic importance and this fantasy (?) made it appear that people who harmed me were interfering with an important experiment.

Saul Bellow
Human character is smaller now, people don't have durable passions; they've replaced passions with excitement. But this won't give you love as strong as death.

Saul Bellow
New York makes one think of the collapse of civilization, about Sodom and Gomorrah, the end of the world. The end wouldn't come as a surprise here. Many people already bank on it.

Saul Bellow
The university, in a society ruled by public opinion, was to have been an island of intellectual freedom where all views were investigated without restriction. … But by consenting to play an active or positive, a participatory role in society, the university has become inundated and saturated with the backflow of society's problems. Preoccupied with questions of Health, Sex, Race, War, academics make their reputations and their fortunes. … Any proposed reforms of liberal education which might bring the university into conflict with the whole of the U.S.A. are unthinkable. Increasingly, the people inside are identical in their appetites and motives with the people outside the university.

Saul Bellow