Top 100 Jose Saramago Quotes
#2. For human words are like shadows, and shadows are incapable of explaining light and between shadow and light there is the opaque body from which words are born..
Jose Saramago
#3. As so often happens, the thing left undone tires you most of all, you only feel rested when it has been accomplished.
Jose Saramago
#4. To continue living, we have to die. That's the story of humanity - generation after generation - that we are going to die. There's nothing dramatic about death except that one loses one's life.
Jose Saramago
#5. The wise man contents himself with what he has, until such time as he invents something better.
Jose Saramago
#6. I'm not pessimistic. It is the world that is terrible. How can we be optimistic in the face of a planet where people live so badly, nature is being destroyed and the dominant empire is money?
Jose Saramago
#7. Blessed be the night, which conceals and protects things fair and foul with the same indifferent mantle.
Jose Saramago
#8. They had their past to remember, the present to live in and the future to fear.
Jose Saramago
#9. There must be a government, said the first blind man, I'm not so sure, but there is, it will be a government of the blind trying to rule the blind, that is to say, nothingness trying to organize nothingness.
Jose Saramago
#10. We can be only too grateful that an Archbishop of Braga should have immersed himself so deeply in theological speculation, armed and equipped as he was for war, with his coat of mail, his broadsword dangling from the
Jose Saramago
#11. She's dead, said the doctor's wife, and her voice was expressionless, if it were possible for such a voice, as dead as the word it had spoken, to have come from a living mouth.
Jose Saramago
#12. Hard experience of life has shown us that, generally speaking, it is inadvisable to trust too much in human nature.
Jose Saramago
#13. I thought that in order to have got to where we are someone else must have been blind.
Jose Saramago
#14. Don't let the devil hear you, minister, The devil has such good hearing he doesn't need things to be spoken out loud, Well, god help us then, There's no point asking him for help either, he was born stone-deaf.
Jose Saramago
#15. How can you not know?" Silvestri said again. "Has twelve years of living the way you've been living not shown you how badly people live? The poverty, the hunger, the ignorance, the fear?" "Yes, but times have changed ... " "Yes, times have changed, but people haven't.
Jose Saramago
#16. Don't you know, If you don't step outside yourself, you'll never discover who you are
Jose Saramago
#17. Earthenware is like people, it needs to be well treated.
Jose Saramago
#18. The order that wants the dead where they should be among the dead, and the living among the living
Jose Saramago
#19. But he is now so accustomed to seeing that vertical strip of light when he opens his eyes in the morning that he has reached the absurd conclusion that without it he would be trapped forever in the shadows of sleep, in the darkness of his own body and the darkness of the world.
Jose Saramago
#20. Because, sir, in case you don't know it, words move, they change from one day to the next, they are as unstable as shadows, are themselves shadows, which both are and have ceased to be, soap bubbles, shells in which one can barely hear a whisper, mere tree stumps.
Jose Saramago
#21. Such is our need to shower blame on some distant entity when it is we who lack the courage to face up to what is there before us.
Jose Saramago
#22. Here are times when it is best to be content with what one has, so as not to lose everything.
Jose Saramago
#23. The U.S. needs to control the Middle East, the gateway to Asia. It already has military installations in Uzbekistan.
Jose Saramago
#24. The time for miracles has either passed or not come yet, besides, miracles, genuine miracles, whatever people say, are not such a good idea, if it means destroying the very order of things in order to improve them.
Jose Saramago
#25. I never appreciated 'positive heroes' in literature. They are almost always cliches, copies of copies, until the model is exhausted. I prefer perplexity, doubt, uncertainty, not just because it provides a more 'productive' literary raw material, but because that is the way we humans really are.
Jose Saramago
#27. You have to leave the island in order to see the island, that we can't see ourselves unless we become free of ourselves, Unless we escape from ourselves you mean, No, that's not the same thing.
Jose Saramago
#28. Images don't see, You're wrong, images see with the eyes of those who see them,
Jose Saramago
#30. In a king, modesty would be a sign of weakness.
Jose Saramago
#31. No, there are three people in a marriage, there's the woman, there's the man, and there's what I call the third person, the most important, the person who is composed of the man and woman together.
Jose Saramago
#32. It just isn't possible for you to ask me all the questions, or for me to give you all the answers.
Jose Saramago
#33. Only the donkey knows how weary it feels, all God cares about are humans, and not all humans, because some of them live like donkeys or worse, and God makes no effort to help them.
Jose Saramago
#34. In the end we discover the only condition for living is to die.
Jose Saramago
#35. That is what we say when we do not wish to play the weakling, we say Fine, even though we may be dying, and this is commonly known as taking one's courage in both hands
Jose Saramago
#36. The sun appears in one of the upper corners of the rectangle, on the left of anyone looking at the picture.
Jose Saramago
#37. We no longer live in that fabulous age when the sun, to whom we owe so much, was so generous that it halted its journey over Gibeon in order to give Joshua ample time to overcome the five kings besieging the city.
Jose Saramago
#38. Anyone who gets up early by inclination or has been forced to rise early out of necessity finds it intolerable that others should go on sleeping soundly
Jose Saramago
#39. Time is a master of ceremonies who always ends up putting us in our rightful place, we advance, stop, and retreat according to his orders, our mistake lies in imagining that we can catch him out.
Jose Saramago
#40. In matters of feeling and of the heart, too much is always better than too little.
Jose Saramago
#41. I don't defend the idea of universal love. It has never existed and will never exist.
Jose Saramago
#42. Fear can cause blindness ... we were already blind the moment we turned blind, fear struck us blind, fear will keep us blind
Jose Saramago
#43. No human being can achieve all he or she desires in this life except in dreams, so good night all.
Jose Saramago
#44. The church I mentioned will be established, but its foundation, in order to be truly solid, will be dug in flesh, its walls made from the cement of renunciation, tears, agony, anguish, every conceivable form of death.
Jose Saramago
#45. A letter is a most hazardous business, the written word allows no indecision, either distance or familiarity will emphasize the tone the letter establishes, and you end up with a relationship that is fiction
Jose Saramago
#46. The attitude of insolent haughtiness is characteristic of the relationships Americans form with what is alien to them, with others.
Jose Saramago
#48. Death isn't catching either, yet nevertheless we all die.
Jose Saramago
#49. I am the same person I was before receiving the Nobel Prize. I work with the same regularity, I have not modified my habits, I have the same friends.
Jose Saramago
#50. The only miracle we can perform is to go on living, said the woman, to preserve the fragility of life from day to day, as if it were blind and did not know where to go, and perhaps it is like that, perhaps it really does not know, it placed itself in our hands, after giving us intelligence.
Jose Saramago
#51. Having is not the same as owning. You can have even those things you don't want. Owning means having and enjoying the things you have. He had a home, a wife and a son, but none of them was truly his. He only had himself, but even then not entirely.
Jose Saramago
#52. Don't be afraid, the darkness you're in is no greater than the darkness inside your own body ...
Jose Saramago
#53. It is an archive ... You probably get rooms like this in even the most modern of offices, like a rusty anchor chained to the past and with no purpose in life.
Jose Saramago
#54. We would understand much more about life's complexities if we applied ourselves to an assiduous study of its contradictions, instead of wasting time
on identities and coherences, seeing as these have a duty to provide their own explanations.
Jose Saramago
#55. I don't think we did go blind, I think we are blind, Blind but seeing, Blind people who can see, but do not see.
Jose Saramago
#56. The republic was no longer a novelty, and here people only appreciate novelties.
Jose Saramago
#57. There are such moments in life, when, in order for heaven to open, it is necessary for a door to close.
Jose Saramago
#58. Men are all the same, they think that because they came out of the belly of a woman they know all there is to know about women.
Jose Saramago
#59. It is an unwavering rule for those in power that, when it comes to heads, it is best to cut them off before they start thinking, afterwards, it might be too late.
Jose Saramago
#60. It is well known that the human mind very often makes decisions for reasons it clearly does not know, presumably because it does so after having travelled the paths of the mind at such speed that, afterwards, it cannot recognise those paths, let alone find them again.
Jose Saramago
#61. Unlike Joseph her husband, Mary is neither upright nor pious, but she is not blame for this, the blame lies with the language she speaks if not with the men who invented it, because that language has no feminine form for the words upright and pious.
Jose Saramago
#62. It's love," thought Abel, "it's love that gives them this calmness, this peace. And suddenly he was gripped by a violent desire to love, to give himself, to find the red flower of love growing in his arid life.
Jose Saramago
#63. The will of God, the creator and ruler of the universe, embraces all possible wills, His own as well as that of every man born into this world. If this is so, intervened Jesus with sudden insight, then each man is a part of God.
Jose Saramago
#64. A writer is a man like any other: he dreams. And my dream was to be able to say of this book, when I finished: 'This is a book about Alentejo'.
Jose Saramago
#65. The pigs, either because of the shock of it or because they hated being possessed by demons, went wild and threw themselves over the cliff, all two thousand of them, and into the lake, where they drowned.
Jose Saramago
#66. I think we are all going to die, it's just a matter of time, Dying has always been a matter of time.
Jose Saramago
#67. The virtue of maps, they show what can be done with limited space, they foresee that everything can happen therein.
Jose Saramago
#68. I don't think it is worth explaining how a character's nose or chin looks. It is my feeling that readers will prefer to construct, little by little, their own character-the author will do well to entrust the reader with this part of the work.
Jose Saramago
#69. That it's possible not to see a lie even when it's in front of us.
Jose Saramago
#70. The best way of killing a rose is to force it open when it is still only the promise of a bud.
Jose Saramago
#71. Words that come from the heart are never spoken, they get caught in the throat and can only be read in ones's eyes.
Jose Saramago
#72. [ ... ]certainly not one of them would have known what to reply if they had been asked, Why are you holding hands as you go, it simply came about, there are gestures for which we cannot always find an easy explanation, sometimes not even a difficult one can be found.
Jose Saramago
#73. It is difficult to understand these people who democratically take part in elections and a referendum, but are then incapable of democratically accepting the will of the people.
Jose Saramago
#74. no one could ever put a splint on a frog's leg
Jose Saramago
#75. We use words to understand each other and even, sometimes, to find each other.
Jose Saramago
#76. The day before is what we bring to the day we're actually living through, life is a matter of carrying along all those days-before just as someone might carry stones, and when we can no longer cope with the load, the work is done, the last day is the only one that is not the day before another day.
Jose Saramago
#77. All these words to say the same sad thing. That's what these people are like, they're never quite sure what they mean.
Jose Saramago
#78. Things will be very bad for Latin America. You only have to consider the ambitions and the doctrines of the empire, which regards this region as its backyard.
Jose Saramago
#79. All the great sadnesses, great temptations, and great mistakes are almost always the result of being alone in life, without a prudent friend to advise us when we are troubled by something more serious than our normal everyday problems.
Jose Saramago
#80. Reading is probably another way of being in a place.
Jose Saramago
#81. the only thing that lasts a whole lifetime is life itself, everything else is inevitably precarious, unstable, transient
Jose Saramago
#83. I had no books at home. I started to frequent a public library in Lisbon. It was there, with no help except curiosity and the will to learn, that my taste for reading developed and was refined.
Jose Saramago
#84. Death is present every day in our lives. It's not that I take pleasure in the morbid fascination of it, but it is a fact of life.
Jose Saramago
#86. BESIDES THE CONVERSATION of women, it is dreams that keep the world in orbit. But dreams also form a diadem of moons, therefore the sky is that splendour inside a man's head, if his head is not, in fact, his own unique sky.
Jose Saramago
#87. The difficult thing isn't living with other people, it's understanding them.
Jose Saramago
#88. On those grim days when he felt surrounded by the vacuum of absurdity, he always felt particularly weary. He tried to blame his weariness on the daily
Jose Saramago
#89. I presume that nobody will deny the positive aspects of the North American cultural world. These are well known to all. But these aspects do not make one forget the disastrous effects of the industrial and commercial process of 'cultural lamination' that the USA is perpetrating on the planet.
Jose Saramago
#90. Keep what is of no use at the moment, and later you will find what you need.
Jose Saramago
#91. what is right and what is wrong are simply different ways of understanding our relationships with the others, not that which we have with ourselves
Jose Saramago
#92. Yet human experience and the practice of communication have shown throughout the ages that definitions are an illusion, like having a speech defect and trying to say love but unable to get the word out, or, better, having a tongue in one's head but unable to feel love.
Jose Saramago
#93. A human being is a being who is constantly 'under construction,' but also, in a parallel fashion, always in a state of constant destruction.
Jose Saramago
#94. You have no idea what it is like to watch two blind people fighting. Fighting has always been, more or less, a form of blindness.
Jose Saramago
#95. Because each of you has his or her own death, you carry it with you in a secret place from the moment you're born, it belongs to you and you belong to it.
Jose Saramago
#96. Our god, the creator of heaven and earth, is completely mad
Jose Saramago
#97. There are certain words that draw back, that refuse to be uttered, because they are too laden with significance for our word-weary ears.
Jose Saramago
#98. When all is said and done, what is clear is that all lives end before their time.
Jose Saramago
#99. If you don't write your books, nobody else will do it for you. No one else has lived your life.
Jose Saramago
#100. Blindness is a private matter between a person and the eyes with which he or she was born.
Jose Saramago
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