Quotes from Saul Bellow

The noise of the world is so terrible that we can endure it only by being coated with sleep.

The human being now simply can't close his elected garment about himself. Obligations to one's fellows perhaps prevent full buttoning by artists.

No, the truth must be something we understand at once, without an introduction or explanation, but so common and familiar that we don't always realize it's around us.

I am a more disinterested Ginsberg admirer than Eddie is. Eddie, so to speak, comes to the table with a croupier's rake. He works for the house. He skims from poetry.

A fool can throw a stone in a pond that 100 wise men can not get out.

Ä°nsan içi boÅŸ isyan saçmal?klar?ndan kaç?nan bir nihiliste dönüÅŸmeden bu koca toplumun kontrollerine nas?l dayanabilir? Daha iyi niyetli baÅŸka dayanma ve özgürce seçme ÅŸekli var m? diye soruyorum.

The free countries are curiously lethargic about their freedom. The credit of revolution is strong in Western Europe, while capitalism, especially in its hated American form, is held to be dying. Many exult over its approaching death. Tired of old evils, they long for the new thing and will not be happy until they've had it. Baudelaire writes, in one of his journals, that life is a hospital in which patient believes that he will recover if he is moved to another bed.

AM fascinated by the profusion and ingenuity of Jewish ideas on the future of Israel.

Personally I am advocating such an objective—to make Israel the center of the new civilization (not less!), taking into consideration the evident decline of the Western (and Eastern as well) civilization….

He goes on to say that if we don't have the gift for effecting change, we have "the solace of criticism.

The Russian Jews, he concludes, can make an important contribution to the necessary revival of religious feeling. Their totalitarian experience has matured their souls as well as toughened their minds.

And it is not hard to guess what he, the descendant of serfs, risen to a position of such might, must have experienced. Confronting the leaders of the bourgeois West, so long feared and hated, he saw himself to be tougher, deeper, and more intelligent than any of them.

O seu espírito era como aquela cisterna, água doce e pura selada sob a tampa de ferro, mas não seguramente potável.

Goethe once stated that anyone who merely increased his knowledge without at the same time showing himself what to do with it poisoned his life.

Although she never went to the synagogue...Grandma [Lausch], all the same, burned a candle on the anniversary of Mr. Lausch's death, threw a lump of dough on the coals when she was baking, a kind of offering, had incantations over baby teeth and stunts against the evil eye. It was kitchen religion and had nothing to do with the G-d of the Creation who turned back the waters and exploded Gomorrah, but it was on the side of religion at that.

That's so often what it is with machinery: be somewhat in doubt and it carries the decision.

Well, we were here, first-generation Americans, our language was English and a language is a spiritual mansion from which no one can evict us.

unshaven storekeeper in Arab headdress and busted shoes who deals in chipped green glassware. He lights up at our question. Yes, of course, he knows. Engaging us in conversation, he offers us coffee.

Our subject: science and religion; the boundaries of scientific knowledge, the certainty that there are other kinds of knowing.

WHETHER people who are greatly respected know what they are saying: Laura (Riding) Jackson warns of the danger that "thinkers" can constitute for the rest of humanity.

Reading Sartre on the Middle East, I wonder whether he really knows what he is saying.

Toward the end of the meal, the talk turns to an important and neglected subject: public opinion. Rabin admits that Israel has not been effective in its publicity. I say that Arab propaganda has become extremely effective and that the Arabs have succeeded in winning worldwide public support. Yes, they have a talent for that sort of thing, Mr. Rabin says; he implies that this is not one of Israel's major problems. I disagree. The

CERTAIN oddities about Israel: Because people think so hard here, and so much, and because of the length and depth of their history, this sliver of a country sometimes seems quite large. Some dimension of mind seems to extend into space.

There is, besides, a considerable tradition of left-wing anti-Semitism in France and Germany. The history of Socialist anti-Semitism is, alas, long and dirty, but I doubt that much of this older, leftist anti-Semitism has survived among European intellectuals.