Saul Bellow - Herzog (1964)

22 Sourced Quotes

View all Saul Bellow Quotes
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
O Lord! he concluded, forgive all these trespasses. Lead me not into Penn Station.

Saul Bellow
My face too blind, my mind too limited, my instincts too narrow. But this intensity, doesn't it mean anything?

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

Saul Bellow
An utterly steady, reliable woman, responsible to the point of grimness. Daisy was a statistician for the Gallup Poll.

Saul Bellow
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.

Saul Bellow
And what about all the good I have in my heart - does it mean anything?

Saul Bellow
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.

Saul Bellow
I pretended not to understand. One of life's hardest jobs, to make a quick understanding slow. I think I succeeded, thought Herzog.

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

Saul Bellow
I don't know exactly how it's done. I let it alone a good deal.

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

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

Saul Bellow
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.

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

Saul Bellow
At moments I dislike having a face, a nose, lips, because he has them.

Saul Bellow
It would not be practical for her to hate herself. Luckily, God sends a substitute, a husband.

Saul Bellow
It is wrong to turn a man (a subject) into a thing (an object). By means of spiritual dialogue, the I-It relationship becomes an I-Thou relationship. God comes and goes in man's soul. And men come and go in each other's souls. Sometimes they come and go in each other's beds, too.

Saul Bellow
Only self-hatred could lead him to ruin himself because his heart was "broken.

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
Unexpected intrusions of beauty. That is what life is.

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

Saul Bellow