Seize The Day Saul Bellow Quotes

You can spend the entire second half of your life recovering from the mistakes of the first half.

I want to tell you, don't marry suffering. Some people do. They get married to it, and sleep and eat together, just as husband and wife. If they go with joy they think it's adultery.

Bringing people into the here-and-now. The real universe. That's the present moment. The past is no good to us. The future is full of anxiety. Only the present is real--the here-and-now. Seize the day.

Facts always are sensational.

He believed that he must, that he could and would recover the good things, the happy things, the easy tranquil things of life. He had made mistakes, but he could overlook these. He had been a fool, but that could be forgiven. The time wasted--must be relinquished. What else could one do about it? Things were too complex, but they might be reduced to simplicity again. Recovery was possible.

Also, he was smoking a cigar, and when a man is smoking a cigar, wearing a hat, he has an advantage; it is harder to find out how he feels.

If you could have confidence in nature you would not have to fear. It would keep you up. Creative is nature. Rapid. Lavish. Inspirational. It shapes leaves. It rolls the waters of the earth. Man is the chief of this. All creations are his just inheritance. You don't know what you've got within you. A person either creates or he destroys. There is no neutrality.

It is my childish mind that thinks people are ready to give it just because you need it.

Oh, God,” Wilhelm prayed, “Let me out of my trouble. Let me out of my thoughts, and let me do something better with myself. For all the time I have wasted I am very sorry. Let me out of this clutch and into a different life. For I am all balled up. Have mercy.

In here, the human bosom -- mine, yours, everybody's -- there isn't just one soul. There's a lot of souls. But there are two main ones, the real soul and a pretender soul. Now! Every man realizes that he has to love something or somebody. He feels that he must go outward. 'If thou canst not love, what art thou?' Are you with me?

One thing should be clear to you now. Money-making is aggression. That's the whole thing. The functionalistic explanation is the only one. People come to the market to kill. They say, 'I'm going to make a killing.' It's not accidental. Only they haven't got the genuine courage to kill, and they erect a symbol of it. The money. They make a killing by fantasy.

You don’t know what you’ve got within you. A person either creates or he destroys. There is no neutrality …

Everyone was like the faces on a playing card, upside down either way.

On Broadway it was still bright afternoon and the gassy air was almost motionless under the leaden spokes of sunlight, and sawdust footprints lay about the doorways of butcher shops and fruit stores. And the great, great crowd, the inexhaustible current of millions of every race and kind pouring out, pressing round, of every race and genius, possessors of every human secret, antique and future, in every face the refinement of one particular motive or essence - I labor, I spend, I strive, I design, I love, I cling, I uphold, I give way, I envy, I long, I scorn, I die, I hide, I want. Faster, much faster than any man could make the tally.

What art thou?' Nothing. That's the answer. Nothing. In the heart of hearts- Nothing! So of course you can't stand that and want to be Something, and you try. But instead of being this Something, the man puts it over on everybody instead.

Every other man spoke a language entirely his own, which he had figured out by private thinking; he had his own ideas and peculiar ways. If you wanted to talk about a glass of water, you had to start back with God creating the heavens and earth; the apple; Abraham; Moses and Jesus; Rome; the Middle Ages; gunpowder; the Revolution; back to Newton; up to Einstein; then war and Lenin and Hitler. After reviewing this and getting it all straight again you could proceed to talk about a glass of water. "I'm fainting, please get me a little water." You were lucky even then to make yourself understood. And this happened over and over and over with everyone you met. You had to translate and translate, explain and explain, back and forth, and it was the punishment of hell itself not to understand or be understood.

Everybody wants to have intimate conversations, but the smart fellows don't give out, only the fools. The smart fellows talk intimately about the fools, and examine them all over and give them advice.

A person can become tired of looking himself over and trying to fix himself up. You can spend the entire second half of your life recovering from the mistakes of the first half

He had made mistakes, but he could overlook these. He had been a fool, but that could be forgiven. The time wasted—must be relinquished

Всеки приличаше на образ от карти за игра - с едното лице нагоре, а другото надолу.

To know how it feels to be a seaweed you have to get in the water.

Who controls everything? Old men of this type. Without needs. They don’t need therefore they have. I need, therefore I don’t have.

You had to talk with yourself in the daytime and reason with yourself at night. Who else was there to talk to in a city like New York?

And where was that day? Past and dead. Whose humiliating memories were these? His and not his father's. What had he to think back on that he could call good? Very, very little. You had to forgive. First, to forgive yourself, and then, general forgiveness.

He liked to wear good clothes, but once he had put it on each article appeared to go its own way.

Roumanian is an easy language. You just add a tl to everything.

You take too many pills of every kind—first stimulants and then depressants, anodynes followed by analeptics, until the poor organism doesn’t know what’s happened.

Creative is nature. Rapid. Lavish. Inspirational. It shapes leaves. It rolls the waters of the earth. Man is the chief of this. All creations are his just inheritance.

Every man realizes that he has to love something or somebody. He feels that he must go outward. ‘If thou canst not love, what art thou?

Under the changes of weather it may look like marble or like sea water, black as slate in the fog, white as tufa in sunlight.

Innately, the female knows how to cripple by sickening a man with guilt. It is a very special destruct, and she sends her curse to make a fellow impotent.

Those are the only two classes of people there are. Some want to live, but the great majority don’t.

So many questions impossible to answer could not be asked about an honest man. Nor perhaps about a sane man.

don't marry suffering. Some people do. They get married to it, and sleep and eat together, just as husband and wife. If they go with joy they think it's adultery." Yes, thought Wilhelm, suffering is the only kind of life they are sure they can have, and if they quit suffering they're afraid they'll have nothing.

I’m deprived of my children.” Wilhelm bit his lip. It was too late to turn away. The anguish struck him. “I pay and pay. I never see them. They grow up without me. She makes them like herself. She’ll bring them up to be my enemies

Someone had said, and Wilhelm agreed with the saying, that in Los Angeles all the loose objects in the country were collected, as if America had been tilted and everything that wasn’t tightly screwed down had slid into Southern California.

A man like you, humble for life, who wants to feel and live, has trouble—not wanting,” said Tamkin in his parenthetical fashion, “to exchange an ounce of soul for a pound of social power—he’ll never make it without help in a world like this.

A wide wrinkle like a comprehensive bracket sign was written upon his forehead, the point between his brows, and there were patches of brown on his dark-blond skin.

And while the losses were small they weren’t gains, were they? They were losses. He was tired of losing, and tired also of the company, and so he had gone by himself to the movies.

It seemed necessary for him to lift one shoulder in order to put his hand into his jacket pocket.

But how we love looking fine in the eyes of the world—how beautiful are the old when they are doing a snow job!

She has two husbands. Whose are the kids? The fellow detected her and she gave a signed confession that two of the four children were not the father’s.

You see, I understand what it is when the lonely person begins to feel like an animal.

Cynicism was bread and meat to everyone. And irony, too. Maybe it couldn’t be helped. It was probably even necessary.

He had on a double-breasted suit of the type then known as the pillbox; it was chalk-striped, pink on blue; the trousers hugged his ankles.

She was a bathing beauty—short, the usual breasts, hips, and smooth thighs.

He was the obscure failure of an aggressive and powerful clan.

You’re very sympathetic, even the young girls feel that. You’d make a good provider. But they go more for the other types.

No court would have awarded her the amounts he paid.

Didn’t Margaret know that he was nearly at the end of his rope? Of course. Her instinct told her that this was her opportunity, and she was giving him the works.

Forgetfully, Wilhelm traveled for miles in second gear; he was seldom in the right lane and he neither gave signals nor watched for lights.

I read the best of literature, science and philosophy,

Korzybski, Aristotle, Freud, W. H. Sheldon, and all the great poets.

I may be old enough for my second childhood, but at least the first is well behind me.

I got a lawyer, and she got one, too, and both of them talk and send me bills, and I eat my heart out.

The lawyers—see?—draw up an agreement, and she says okay on Monday and wants more money on Tuesday. And it begins again.

She just has fixed herself on me to kill me. She can do it at long distance. One of these days I’ll be struck down by suffocation or apoplexy because of her.

A rich man may be free on an income of a million net. A poor man may be free because nobody cares what he does. But a fellow in my position has to sweat it out until he drops dead.

No, it was me. I didn’t want to leave, but I couldn’t stay. Somebody had to take the initiative. I did. Now I’m the fall guy too.

Maybe the making of mistakes expressed the very purpose of his life and the essence of his being here.

Affable! His own son, his one and only son, could not speak his mind or ease his heart to him.

The true soul is the one that pays the price. It suffers and gets sick, and it realizes that the pretender can’t be loved.

Rubin, the man at the newsstand, had poor eyes. They may not have been actually weak but they were poor in expression, with lacy lids that furled down at the corners.

In full tumult the great afternoon current raced for Columbus Circle, where the mouth of midtown stood open and the skyscrapers gave back the yellow fire of the sun.

Dr. Adler surrendered his arm to the masseur, who was using wintergreen oil.

Is it an easier farewell for Dad if we don’t part friends?

This is the way of the weak; quiet and fair.

Because of unhappiness, at a certain age, the brain starts to die back.

His taste in clothes was horrible, but he didn’t buy cheap things. He wore corduroy or velvet shirts from Clyde’s, painted neckties, striped socks.

They did not know how much he cared for them. No. It hurt him greatly and he blamed Margaret for turning them against him. She wanted to ruin him, while she wore the mask of kindness.

No one seemed satisfied, and Wilhelm was especially horrified by the cynicism of successful people. Cynicism was bread and meat to everyone And irony, too. Maybe it couldn’t be helped.

You were lucky even then to make yourself understood. And this happened over and over and over with everyone you met. You had to translate and translate, explain and explain, back and forth, and it was the punishment of hell itself not to understand or be understood, not to know the crazy from the sane, the wise from the fools, the young from the old or the sick from the well.

He was an extremely correct person except that he never shaved in the morning, not caring, probably, how he looked to the fumblers and the old people and the operators and the gamblers and the idlers of Broadway uptown.

The elderly ladies were rouged and mascaraed and hennaed and used blue hair rinse and eye shadow and wore costume jewelry, and many of them were proud and stared at you with expressions that did not belong to their age.

His marriage, too, had been like that. Through such decisions somehow his life had taken form. And so, from the moment when he tasted the peculiar flavor of fatality in Dr. Tamkin, he could no longer keep back the money.

Margaret would tell him he did not really want a divorce; he was afraid of it. He cried, “Take everything I’ve got, Margaret. Let me go to Reno. Don’t you want to marry again?” No. She went out with other men, but took his money. She lived in order to punish him.

En realidad hay pocas cosas que se puedan cambiar sólo con quererlo. No se pueden cambiar los pulmones, los nervios, la constitución ni el carácter. Nada de eso está al alcance del ser humano. Cuando se es joven, fuerte e impulsivo y no se está contento con la marcha de las cosas, se siente el deseo de cambiar lo todo para afirmar la propia libertad. No se puede derribar el gobierno ni nacer de otro modo: sólo se cuenta con un horizonte limitado y tal vez el presentimiento de que, esencialmente, no se puede cambiar.

In middle age you no longer thought such thoughts about free choice. Then it came over you that from one grandfather you had inherited such and such a head of hair which looked like honey when it whitens or sugars in the jar; from another, broad thick shoulders; an oddity of speech from one uncle, and small teeth from another, and the gray eyes with darkness diffused even into the whites, and a wide-lipped mouth like a statue from Peru. Wandering races have such looks, the bones of one tribe, the skin of another. From his mother he had gotten sensitive feelings, a soft heart, a brooding nature, a tendency to be confused under pressure.

Çfarë je ti?" Asgjë. Kjo është përgjigja. Asgjë. Në zemër të zemrave, asgjë! Kështu që natyrisht nuk e duron këtë dhe do të jesh Diçka dhe përpiqesh. Po në vend të jetë ky Diçka, njeriu kërkon të përfitojë me mashtrim nga gjithsecili. Nuk mund të jesh aq i ngurtë me vetveten. Ti do pak. Sikur të jesh një qen - (Gërshëra) - apo sikur jep ca pare për një udhëtim bamirësie. Tani, kjo s'është dashuri, apo jo? Çfarë është? Vetkënaqësi e pastër dhe e thjeshtë. Kjo është mënyra të duash shpirtin synues. Vanitet. Vetëm vaniteti është kështu. Dhe kontrolli shoqëror. Interesi i shpirtit synues është i njëjtë me interesin e jetës shoqërore, mekanizmin e shoqërisë. Kjo është tragjedia e jetës njerëzore. Është e tmerrshme! Nuk je i lirë. Tradhëtari yt është brenda teje dhe të tradhëton. Ti duhet t'i bindesh atij si një skllav. Ai të shtyn të punosh si kalë. Dhe përse? Për çfarë?