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Saul Bellow
61 quotes
“Reading Decline of the West I learned that in Spengler’s view ours was a Faustian civilization and that we, the Jews, were Magians, the survivors and representatives of an earlier type, totally incapable of comprehending the Faustian spirit that had created the great civilization of the West. … What Magians were to Faustians, Faustians might very well be to Americans.”
Saul Bellow (1915–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1915–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What is imposed on us by birth and environment is what we are called upon to overcome.”
Saul Bellow (1915–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1915–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1915–2005) first seen 1976 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: To Jerusalem and Back: A Personal Account (1976) [Viking/Penguin, 1998, ], p. 21
“In the greatest confusion there is still an open channel to the soul. It may be difficult to find because by midlife it is overgrown, and some of the wildest thickets that surround it grow out of what we describe as our education. But the channel is always there, and it is our business to keep it open, to have access to the deepest part of ourselves—to that part of us which is conscious. … The independence of this consciousness, which has the strength to be immune to the noise of history and the distractions of our immediate surroundings, is what the life struggle is all about. The soul has to find and hold its ground against hostile forces, sometimes embodied in ideas which frequently deny its very existence, and which indeed often seem to be trying to annul it altogether.”
Saul Bellow (1915–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1915–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Pointless but intense excitement holds us in TV dramas. We hear threatening music. A killer with a gun steals into the bedroom of a sleeping woman. More subliminal sounds of danger, pointlessly ominous. The woman wakes and runs into the kitchen for a knife. The cops are on the case. We watch as the criminal is pursued through night streets; shots, a death; a body falls from a roof. Then time is up, another drama begins. Now we are in a church. No, we are in a lecture hall; no again — a drawer opens in a morgue. A woman is looking for her kidnapped child. Then that ends, and we are on the veld with zebras and giraffes. Then with Lenin at a mass meeting. And suddenly we flash away to a cooking school; we are shown how to stuff a turkey. Next the Berlin Wall comes down. Or flags are burning. Or a panel is worrying about the rug crisis. More and more public themes, with less and less personal consciousness. Clearly, personal consciousness is shrinking.”
Saul Bellow (1915–2005) first seen 1990 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Distracted Public" (1990), pp. 159-160
“Writers, poets, painters, musicians, philosophers, political thinkers, to name only a few of the categories affected, must woo their readers, viewers, listeners, from distraction. To this we must add, for simple realism demands it, that these same writers, painters, etc., are themselves the children of distraction. As such, they are peculiarly qualified to approach the distracted multitudes. They will have experienced the seductions as well as the destructiveness of the forces we have been considering here. This is the destructive element in which we do not need to be summoned to immerse ourselves, for we were born to it.”
Saul Bellow (1915–2005) first seen 1990 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Distracted Public" (1990), p. 167
“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 (1915–2005) first seen 1990 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Distracted Public" (1990)
“There's something that remains barbarous in educated people, and lately I've more and more had the feeling that we are nonwondering primitives. And why is it that we no longer marvel at these technological miracles? They've become the external facts of every life. We've all been to the university, we've had introductory courses in everything, and therefore we have persuaded ourselves that if we had the time to apply ourselves to these scientific marvels, we would understand them. But of course that's an illusion. It couldn't happen. Even among people who have had careers in science. They know no more about how it all works than we do. So we are in the position of savage men who, however, have been educated into believing that they are capable of understanding everything. Not that we actually do understand, but that we have the capacity.”
Saul Bellow (1915–2005) first seen 1990 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: A Half Life" (1990), pp. 302-303