Philosophy Quote by Saul Bellow — Inspiring Words on Life, Love & Wisdom

“The old continued to have one resurgence of foolishness after another, until the organism gave out altogether.”

“Death is going to take the boundaries away from us, that we should no more be persons. That's what death is about. When that is what life also wants to be about, how can you feel except rebellious?”

“The earth was a grave: our life was lent to it by its elements and had to be returned: a time came when the simple elements seemed to long for release from the complicated forms of life, when every element of every cell said, "Enough!" The planet was our mother and our burial ground. No wonder the human spirit wished to leave. Leave this prolific belly. Leave also this great tomb. Passion for the infinite caused by the terror, by timor mortis, needed material appeasement.”

“With one long breath, caught and held in his chest, he fought his sadness over his solitary life. Don't cry, you idiot! Live or die, but don't poison everything...”

“And everything soon must change. Men would set their watches by other suns than this. Or time would vanish. We would need no personal names of the old sort in the sidereal future, nothing being fixed. We would be designated by other nouns. Days and nights would belong to the museums. The earth a memorial park, a merry-go-round cemetery. The seas powdering our bones like quartz, making sand, grinding our peace for us by the aeon. Well, that would be good - a melancholy good.”

“Poetry and art nourish the soul of the world with the flavor-filled substances of beauty, wisdom and truth.”

“I am not nothing in the sense of emptiness, but I am the creative nothing, the nothing out of which I myself as creator create everything.”

“Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains" - Rousseau”

“They can very well try to find each other; they will never find anything but parodic images, and they will fall asleep as empty as mirrors.”

“For axioms in philosophy are not axioms until they are proved upon our pulses.”

“Call no man happy until he is dead.”