Saul Bellow Quotes

I first started asking big questions when I was 12, and by big questions, I mean, 'Why are we here? What is this business? We're alive for a few short decades and then poof, we're out of here.'

Any art worthy of its name should address 'life', 'man', 'nature', 'death' and 'tragedy'.

Regarding life, the wisest men of all ages have judged alike: it is worthless.

Some old guy once said that the meaning of life is that it ends.

We all die at the end, but does that nullify everything? Would most people rather say, "I wish I hadn't been born?" Once you're born you'll have to die, now is that funny or sad?

If life is so meaningless, then why are we always bringing it up?

I think life's an irrational obsession.

One must either take an interest in the human situation or else parade before the void.

In the last analysis, it is our conception of death which decides our answers to all the questions that life puts to us.

Why are we here? Where do we come from? Traditionally, these are questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead.

The most interesting thing in the world is another human being who wonders, suffers and raises the questions that have bothered him to the last day of his life, knowing he will never get the answers.

I saw that philosophy had no power to make my life more bearable. Thus I lost my belief in philosophy.

Not to be born is, past all prizing, best.

When I'm lying in my bed I think about life and I think about death and neither one particularly appeals to me.

'Hamlet' is one of the most dangerous things ever set down on paper. All the big, unknowable questions like what it is to be a human being; the difference between sanity and insanity; the meaning of life and death; what's real and not real. All these subjects can literally drive you mad.

Everything has been figured out, except how to live.

In the nineteenth century the problem was that God is dead. In the twentieth century the problem is that man is dead.

It is not in the world of ideas that life is lived. Life is lived for better or worse in life, and to a man in life, his life can be no more absurd than it can be the opposite of absurd, whatever that opposite may be.

To be, or not to be, that is the question.

Without knowing what I am and why I am here, life is impossible.

Often and often must he have thought, that, to be or not to be forever, was a question, which must be settled; as it is the foundation, and the only foundation upon which we feel that there can rest one thought, one feeling, or one purpose worthy of a human soul.

On a cosmic scale, our life is insignificant, yet this brief period when we appear in the world is the time in which all meaningful questions arise.

If you don't ponder the end of the world on a regular basis, I don't think you're really human.

Life has become the ideology of its own absence.

You must realize that one day you will die. Until then you are worthless.