“Everybody knows there is no fineness or accuracy of suppression; if you hold down one thing, you hold down the adjoining.”

— Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March (1953), Ch. 1

About Saul Bellow

1915 – 2005

Canadian-American novelist and Nobel laureate in Literature (1976).

“All human accomplishment has the same origin, identically. Imagination is a force of nature.”

“Goodness is achieved not in a vacuum, but in the company of other men, attended by love.”

“The humanities would be called upon to choose a wallpaper for the crypt, as the end drew near.”

“If to do were as easy as to know what were good to do, chapels had been churches, and poor men's cottages princes' palaces.”

“Always take the short cut; and that is the rational one. Therefore say and do everything according to soundest reason.”

“The young have exalted notions, because they have not been humbled by life or learned its necessary limitations.”

“Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.”

“I assert that the cosmic religious experience is the strongest and noblest driving force behind scientific research.”

“There is no logical path to these laws; only intuition, resting on sympathetic understanding of experience, can reach them.”