Saul Bellow Quotes

We don't like admitting this, but it is a key component of human existence: the fact that life has the potential for things both wondrous and horrific.

Hope is one of those no-win-no-fee things, and although it needs some encouragement to survive, its existence doesn't necessarily prove anything.

Life is a foreign language; all men mispronounce it.

Everything will probably never be OK. But we have to try for it.

I was born accidentally. I lived accidentally in London. We nearly migrated to New Zealand. So much of my life has been a product of chance, I can't see a meaning in it at all.

We live in a world of constant juxtaposition between joy that's possible and pain that's all too common. We hope for love and success and abundance, but we never quite forget that there is always lurking the possibility of disaster.

You just do the best you can and hope people see the potential in it.

We're just going to be ourselves, and we're just going to cross our fingers and hope that people like it. Because that's all you can do.

“God,” she cried, “what is love? Man seeking his own head? The human head, so rented by misery that even the teeth weigh! She couldn't tell me the truth because she had never planned it; her life was a continual accident, and how can you be prepared for that? Everything we can't bear in this world, some day we find in one person, and love it all at once.”

I fear it, for her sake. It would mean that she too is a wanderer now, and that is a fate for human beings, not for unicorns. But I hope, of course I hope.

I just hope it was okay, I know it wasn't perfect, I hope in the end we can laugh and say it was all worth it.

So he lived, not knowing and not seeing any chance of knowing what he was and for what purpose he had been placed in the word.

. . . the messiness of experience, that may be what we mean by life.

Life is a mixed blessing, which we vainly try to unmix.

Sometimes you wonder, I mean really wonder. I know we make our own reality, and we always have a choice, but how much is preordained? Is there always a fork in the road, and are there two preordained paths that are equally preordained? There could be hundreds of paths where one could go this way or that way -- there's a chance, and it's very strange sometimes.

The nature of tragedy and accident is that we cannot predict.

Human existence basically is──a never to be completed imperfect tense.

Sometimes I think God is like weather - you may not like the weather, but it has nothing to do with you. You just happen to be there. Deal with it. Sadness and grief are part of being human and always will be.

Look, the point is there's no way to be a hundred percent sure about anyone or anything. So you're left with a choice. Either hope for the best or just expect the worst.

We’re not living in an age of no hope. We are living in the age of choice, which is much scarier. It means that what we do every day matters, which is always a bummer for humans. But it’s a great thing and it’s inspirational and we need to remember that. We have a long way to go and not a long time to get there.

Wisdom means understanding without any doubt that circumstances do not rise to meet our expectations. Events happen as they may. People behave as they will.

In the end, each life is no more than the sum of contingent facts, a chronicle of chance intersections, of flukes, of random events that divulge nothing but their own lack of purpose.

Alas! What is man? Whether he be deprived of that light which is from on high, of whether he discard it, a frail and trembling creature; standing on time, that bleak and narrow isthmus between two eternities, he sees nothing but impenetrable darkness on the one hand, and doubt, distrust, and conjecture, still more perplexing, on the other. Most gladly would he take an observation, as to whence he has come, or whither he is going; alas, he has not the means: his telescope is too dim, his compass too wavering, his plummet too short.

People still have existential anxiety. It just may not be expressed in Hebraic idiom.

Man has to live with the body and soul which have fallen to him by chance.