Saul Bellow Quotes

Everything that we perceive around us is struggling towards freedom, from the atom to the man, from the insentient, lifeless particle of matter to the highest existence on earth, the human soul. The whole universe is in fact the result of this struggle for freedom.

Those men and women are fortunate who are born at a time when a great struggle for human freedom is in progress.

The struggle for freedom and justice is now.

This is not a jungle war, but a struggle for freedom on every front of human activity.

Unfortunate. Unfortunate. Sometimes people struggling for freedom lose their way.

Many Americans knew their lives and their souls were being struggled for, and they fought for it. And I felt I should carry on.

Adolescence is when the very worst and best impulses in the human soul struggle against each other for possession.

If we ever get free from all the oppressions and wrongs heaped upon us, we must pay for their removal. We must do this by labor, by suffering, by sacrifice, and, if needs be, by our lives, and the lives of others.

All change in life comes from within. It is what's in humanity's soul, not what's in humanity's wallet, that will purchase our freedom from humanity's suffering.

My soul is nothing now but the dream dreamt by matter struggling with itself!

On bended knee is no way to be free lifting up an empty cup I ask silently that all my destinations will accept the one that's me so I can breath Circles they grow and they swallow people whole half their lives they say goodnight to wive's they'll never know got a mind full of questions and a teacher in my soul so it goes.

Crime, violence, infamy are not tragedy. Tragedy occurs when a human soul awakes and seeks, in suffering and pain, to free itself from crime, violence, infamy, even at the cost of life. The struggle is the tragedy - not defeat or death. That is why the spectacle of tragedy has always filled men, not with despair, but with a sense of hope and exaltation.

What if evil doesn't really exist? What if evil is something dreamed up by man, and there is nothing to struggle against except out own limitations? The constant battle between our will, our desires, and our choices?

Individuality realized is the supreme attainment of the human soul, the master-master's work of art. Individuality is sacred.

The intellectual and moral satisfaction that I failed to gain from the utilitarianism of Bentham and Mill, the revolutionary methods of Marx and Lenin, the social contract theory of Hobbes, the "back to nature" optimism of Rousseau, and the superman philosophy of Nietzsche, I found in the nonviolent resistance philosophy of Gandhi. I came to feel that this was the only morally and practically sound method open to oppressed people in their struggle for freedom.

Every man has a mob self and an individual self, in varying proportions.

Yours is a race whose imagination is limited to its own small appetites. Greed, lust, envy - these are the motivating forces of humankind. What redeems you is that in every man and woman there is a seed that can grow to encompass love, joy and compassion. But this seed is never allowed to prosper in fertile ground. It struggles for life among the rocks of your human soul.

While preaching against every kind of government, and demanding complete freedom, we must support all struggles for partial freedom, because we are convinced that one learns through struggle.

With stammering lips and insufficient sound I strive and struggle to deliver right the music of my nature.

We live in our tales of ourselves, she thought, and ignore as best we can the contradictions, and the lapses, and the abrasions of plot against our mortal souls.

The struggle of our people for freedom has progressed to the form where all of us must take a stand either for or against the freedom of our people You are either with Your People or against them. You are either part of the solution or part of the problem.

Your readiness to suffer will light the torch of freedom which will never be put out.

All the souls to explore! - It's not so necessary to love, really, as it is to settle something deep with all of those who really matter. Love and hate are the same things, differently sifted through personal... pride, or what have you... personal pride or even just personal-ness.

Part of our business is that you read interviews with these people and they don't really talk candidly about what's going on and the struggle - the struggle to do what you love and to maintain body image and to maintain this sort of false stature of who you're supposed to be as a role model and also who you are supposed to be to yourself personally and privately.

And we who have toiled for freedom's law, have we sought for freedom's soul? Have we learned at last that human right is not a part but the whole?