Saul Bellow: Trending quotes (page 2)

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“In politics continental Europe was infantile — horrifying. What America lacked, for all its political stability, was the capacity to enjoy intellectual pleasures as though they were sensual pleasures. This is what Europe offered, or was said to offer.”

Saul Bellow

"My Paris" (1983), p. 235
It All Adds Up (1994)

Pleasure

“We take foreigners to be incomplete Americans — convinced that we must help and hasten their evolution.”

Saul Bellow

" A Second Half Life" (1991), p. 324
It All Adds Up (1994)

Help

“Our media make crisis chatter out of news and fill our minds with anxious phantoms of the real thing — a summit in Helsinki, a treaty in Egypt, a constitutional crisis in India, a vote in the U. N., the financial collapse of New York. We can't avoid being politicized (a word as murky as the condition which it describes) because it is necessary after all to know what is going on. Worse yet, what is going on will not let us alone. Neither the facts nor the deformations, the insidious platitudes of the media (tormenting because the underlying realities are so large and so terrible), can be screened out. The study of literature itself is heavily "politicized."”

Saul Bellow

To Jerusalem and Back: A Personal Account (1976) [Viking/Penguin, 1998, ISBN 0-141-18075-7], p. 21
General sources

Literature , Reality , Study

“What is imposed on us by birth and environment is what we are called upon to overcome.”

Saul Bellow

Part I, p. 28
A Jewish Writer in America (2011)

Birth

“Tocqueville predicted that in democratic countries the public would demand larger and larger doses of excitement and increasingly stronger stimulants from its writers. He probably did not expect that public to dramatize itself so extensively, to make the world scene everybody's theatre, or, in the developed countries, to take to alcohol and drugs in order to get relief from the horrors of ceaseless intensity, the torment of thrills and distractions. A great many writers have done little more than meet the mounting demand for thrills. I think that this demand has, in the language of marketing, peaked.”

Saul Bellow

"The Distracted Public" (1990)
It All Adds Up (1994)

Alcohol , World , Thinking , Country

“If women are expected to do the same work as men, we must teach them the same things.”

Saul Bellow

If women are to have the same duties as men, they must have the same nurture and education. — Plato, The Republic, Book V, trans. Benjamin Jowett, third edition, Oxford University Press, 1892 http://oll.libertyfund.org/Home3/HTML.php?recordID=0345#hd_lf131.3.head.017
Misattributed
Variant: So if we are going to use men and women for the same purposes, they must be taught the same things. The Republic, trans. Desmond Lee [Penguin Classics, 2003, ISBN 0-140-449140-0], p. 161
Variant: Then if we are to use the women for the same things as the men, we must teach them the same things. The Republic, trans. W. H. D. Rouse [Signet Classic, 1999, ISBN 0-451-52745-3], p. 249

Women , Men

“Anxiety destroys scale, and suffering makes us lose perspective.”

Saul Bellow

"The Sealed Treasure" (1960), p. 62
It All Adds Up (1994)

Suffering

“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

"The Jefferson Lectures" (1977), p. 139
It All Adds Up (1994)

People , History , Business

“One naturally regrets not being an expert or one of those insiders who thoroughly understand. It's hell to be an amateur. A little reflection calms your sorrow, however. The experts in their own little speedboat, the rest of us floating with the rest of mankind in a great barge — that is the picture.”

Saul Bellow

"The Day They Signed the Treaty" (1979), p. 224
It All Adds Up (1994)

Hell , Understanding , Nature

“We are free to withdraw (to withdraw our minds where we cannot withdraw our bodies) from situations in which our humanity or lack of it is defined for us.”

Saul Bellow

Part II, p. 29
A Jewish Writer in America (2011)

“Can we find nothing good to say about TV? Well, yes, it brings scattered solitaries into a sort of communion. TV allows your isolated American to think that he participates in the life of the entire country. It does not actually place him in a community, but his heart is warmed with the suggestion (on the whole false) that there is a community somewhere in the vicinity and that his atomized consciousness will be drawn back toward the whole.”

Saul Bellow

"The Distracted Public" (1990), p. 159
It All Adds Up (1994)

Life , Communication , Thinking , Heart

“Whoever wants to reach a distant goal must take small steps.”

Saul Bellow

Attributed in Fun Fitness for Families (2005) by James Steffen, p. 24 and later publications; also attributed to Helmut Schmidt, in The 7 Ultimate Secrets to Weight Loss (2011) by Natasa Denman, p. 31 and later publications.
Disputed

Cute , Distant

“Once you had read the Psychopathology of Everyday Life, you knew that everyday life was psychopathology.”

Saul Bellow book Humboldt's Gift

Humboldt's Gift (1975) [Penguin Classics, 1996, ISBN 0-140-18944-0], p. 5
General sources

Life , Reading

“As for types like my own, obscurely motivated by the conviction that our existence was worthless if we didn’t make a turning point of it, we were assigned to the humanities, to poetry, philosophy, painting — the nursery games of humankind, which had to be left behind when the age of science began. The humanities would be called upon to choose a wallpaper for the crypt, as the end drew near.”

Saul Bellow book The Adventures of Augie March

Source: The Adventures of Augie March (1953), Ch. 6

Age , Game , Motivation , Science

“One’s language is a spiritual location. It houses your soul. If you were born in America all essential communication, your deepest conversations with yourself, will be in English. … Your English is the principal instrument of your humanity.”

Saul Bellow

Part I, p. 27
A Jewish Writer in America (2011)

Soul , Communication , Housing

“Everybody knows there is no fineness or accuracy of suppression; if you hold down one thing, you hold down the adjoining.”

Saul Bellow book The Adventures of Augie March

Source: The Adventures of Augie March (1953), Ch. 1

“All a writer has to do to get a woman is to say he's a writer. It's an aphrodisiac.”

Saul Bellow

As quoted in "Dailer's Choice" by Harriet Van Horne, in New York Magazine Vol. 10, No. 13 (28 March 1977), p. 80
General sources

“For the first time in history, the human species as a whole has gone into politics. Everyone is in the act, and there is no telling what may come of it.”

Saul Bellow

To Jerusalem and Back: A Personal Account (1976), p. 38
General sources

History , Time

“I never yet touched a fig leaf that didn't turn into a price tag.”

Saul Bellow book Humboldt's Gift

Humboldt's Gift (1975), p. 159
General sources

“There are evils, as someone has pointed out, that have the ability to survive identification and go on for ever — money, for instance, or war.”

Saul Bellow book The Dean's December

The Dean’s December (1982) [Penguin Classics, 1998, ISBN 0-140-18913-0], ch. 13, p. 140
General sources

Money , War , Evil