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One’s language is a spiritual location. It houses your soul. If you were born in America all essential communication, your deepest conversations with yourself, will be in English. … Your English is the principal instrument of your humanity.

— Saul Bellow A Jewish Writer in America (2011)

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More quotes by Saul Bellow

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

Dangling Man (1944)

For the first time in history, the human species as a whole has gone into politics. Everyone is in the act, and there is no telling what may come of it.

To Jerusalem and Back: A Personal Account (1976)

A novel is balanced between a few true impressions and the multitude of false ones that make up most of what we call life.

In an age of enormities, the emotions are naturally weakened.

It All Adds Up (1994)

This is what makes packaged opinion so attractive.

It All Adds Up (1994)

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Reason is Life's sole arbiter, the magic Laby'rinth's single clue:
Worlds lie above, beyond its ken; what crosses it can ne'er be true.

Richard Francis Burton The Kasîdah of Hâjî Abdû El-Yezdî (1870)

In imitating the exemplary acts of a god or of a mythic hero, or simply by recounting their adventures, the man of an archaic society detaches himself from profane time and magically re-enters the Great Time, the sacred time.

Mircea Eliade Myths, Dreams and Mysteries (1967)

Enlighten the people generally, and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day.

Thomas Jefferson

The superior man loves his soul; the inferior man loves his property.

Confucius

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Saul Bellow (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.