Top 100 Jose Saramago Quotes
#1. The books I love most are the ones that combine some sort of gripping story with really beautiful or stylish writing. Some of my favorites are 'The Road' by Cormac McCarthy, 'The Virgin Suicides' by Jeffrey Eugenides, 'The Interpreter of Maladies' by Jhumpa Lahiri, and 'Blindness' by Jose Saramago.
Karen Thompson Walker
#2. Authors I've longed to write like - but realize I actually can't even begin to - include Poe, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Kafka, Daniil Kharms, Witold Gombrowicz, Emily Dickinson, Robert Walser, Barbara Comyns, Ntozake Shange, Camille Laurens, Zbigniew Herbert, and Jose Saramago.
Helen Oyeyemi
#3. [...] it seems you don't understand that words are the labels we stick on things, not the things themselves, you'll never know what the things are really like, nor even what their real names are, because the names you gave them are just that, the names you gave them [...]
Jose Saramago
#5. A stomach accustomed to hunger is satisfied with very little.
Jose Saramago
#6. Most common thing in marriage is to see the man or the woman, or both, each in their own way, trying to destroy the third person that they form together, the one that resists, that wants to survive regardless,
Jose Saramago
#7. Put less respectfully, these men and women, standing before the mirror of their life, spit every day in the face of what they were with the sputum of what they are.
Jose Saramago
#8. 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
#9. As so often happens, the thing left undone tires you most of all, you only feel rested when it has been accomplished.
Jose Saramago
#10. 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
#11. The wise man contents himself with what he has, until such time as he invents something better.
Jose Saramago
#12. Penetrating the walls and rising to the stars, the music continued, the slow movement of the Eroica Symphony, crying out against pain, crying out against the injustice of man's mortality.
Jose Saramago
#13. We have deemed all these words necessary in order to explain that we have been traveling more slowly than was predicted, concision is not a definitive virtue, on occasion one loses out by talking too much, it is true, but how much has also been gained by saying more than was strictly necessary.
Jose Saramago
#14. Whether we like it or not, the one justification for the existence of all religions is death, they need death as much as we need bread to eat.
Jose Saramago
#15. Doubt is the privilege of those who have lived a long time,
Jose Saramago
#16. 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
#17. Each part in itself constitutes the whole to which it belongs.
Jose Saramago
#18. I am a four-dimensional ghost, he murmured to himself.
Jose Saramago
#19. Blessed be the night, which conceals and protects things fair and foul with the same indifferent mantle.
Jose Saramago
#20. Virtue, should there be anyone who still ignores the fact, always finds pitfalls on the extremely difficult path of perfection, but sin and vice are so favoured by fortune ...
Jose Saramago
#21. They had their past to remember, the present to live in and the future to fear.
Jose Saramago
#22. Just as the habit does not make the monk, the sceptre does not make the king.
Jose Saramago
#23. 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
#24. Human nature is, by definition, a talkative one, imprudent, indiscreet, gossipy, incapable of closing its mouth and keeping it closed.
Jose Saramago
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. The world had already changed before September 11. The world has been going through a process of change over the last 20 or 30 years. A civilization ends, another one begins.
Jose Saramago
#28. Switch on the light, she said, I want to know if this is real.
Jose Saramago
#29. I have yet to hear a single idea that was worth considering for longer than it took us to listen to it.
Jose Saramago
#30. A writer is just like anyone else, he cannot know everything, nor can he experience everything, he must ask and imagine,
Jose Saramago
#31. The devil doesn't make plans, anyway, if men were good, he wouldn't even exist.
Jose Saramago
#33. We are so afraid of the idea of having to die ... that we always try to find excuses for the dead, as if we were asking beforehand to be excused when it is our turn ...
Jose Saramago
#34. ...the man who I still am loves the woman that you are
Jose Saramago
#35. Now, on the contrary, here he was , plunged into a whiteness so luminous, so total, that it swallowed up rather than absorbed, not just colours, but the very things and beings , thus making them twice as invisible
Jose Saramago
#37. God does not forgive the sins He makes us commit.
Jose Saramago
#38. Hard experience of life has shown us that, generally speaking, it is inadvisable to trust too much in human nature.
Jose Saramago
#39. From Spain expect only cold winds and cold wives.'" "Ah, so you don't think they get on, then?
Jose Saramago
#40. I thought that in order to have got to where we are someone else must have been blind.
Jose Saramago
#41. No, I've never been to Galicia, Galicia is the land of others
Jose Saramago
#42. Men are angels born without wings, nothing could be nicer than to be born without wings and to make them grow.
Jose Saramago
#43. Society has to change, but the political powers we have at the moment are not enough to effect this change. The whole democratic system would have to be rethought.
Jose Saramago
#44. Forgive me if what has seemed little to you, to me is all.
Jose Saramago
#45. 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
#46. If I could repeat my childhood, I would repeat it exactly as it was, with the poverty, the cold, little food, with the flies and pigs, all that.
Jose Saramago
#47. 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
#48. When we are born, when we enter this world, it is as if we signed a pact for the rest of our life, but a day may come when we will ask ourselves Who signed this on my behalf?
Jose Saramago
#49. There are plenty of reasons not to put up with the world as it is.
Jose Saramago
#50. Liking is probably the best form of ownership, and ownership the worst form of liking.
Jose Saramago
#51. Don't you know, If you don't step outside yourself, you'll never discover who you are
Jose Saramago
#52. Hen he added, as if requiring a response to his own remark,
'Probably the greater the difference, the greater the similarity, and the greater the similarity, the greater the difference,' at that moment he did not yet know how right he was.
Jose Saramago
#53. We're not short of movements proclaiming that a different world is possible, but unless we can coordinate them into an international movement, capitalism just laughs at all these little organisations.
Jose Saramago
#54. Even death, faced with the option of death or life, she would choose life.
Jose Saramago
#55. Today's bread does not eliminate yesterday's hunger, much less that of tomorrow.
Jose Saramago
#56. Such insignificant differences as a few hundred years here or there were the motive for long, long controversies, both public and academic, which almost always resulted in the violent breakup of personal relationships and even in mortal enmities.
Jose Saramago
#57. Earthenware is like people, it needs to be well treated.
Jose Saramago
#58. The order that wants the dead where they should be among the dead, and the living among the living
Jose Saramago
#59. 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
#61. I still have the strength to carry the bread I eat, What always weighs more is the bread of the others,
Jose Saramago
#62. 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
#63. None of them has a capital P branded on his forehead,
Jose Saramago
#64. The world is governed by institutions that are not democratic - the World Bank, the IMF, the WTO.
Jose Saramago
#65. 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
#66. A man must earn his daily bread by some means some-where, and if his bread fails to nourish his soul, at least his body will be nourished while his soul suffers.
Jose Saramago
#67. One could argue that those who have abandoned their homes do not deserve to live there and enjoy them
Jose Saramago
#68. Here are times when it is best to be content with what one has, so as not to lose everything.
Jose Saramago
#69. The U.S. needs to control the Middle East, the gateway to Asia. It already has military installations in Uzbekistan.
Jose Saramago
#70. 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
#71. God will save you.
Surely you're forgetting that God saves souls rather than bodies.
Jose Saramago
#72. 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
#73. I always ask two questions: How many countries have military bases in the United States? And in how many countries does the United States not have military bases?
Jose Saramago
#75. Pommel of his saddle and his helmet with a nose-piece, arms which might well prevent him from reaching any conclusions based on humanitarian logic,
Jose Saramago
#76. 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
#77. Writer's make national literature, while translators make universal literature.
Jose Saramago
#78. Images don't see, You're wrong, images see with the eyes of those who see them,
Jose Saramago
#79. Who is that witch, asked the old man with the black eyepatch, these are things we say when we do not know how to take a good look at ourselves, had he lived as she had lived, we should like to see how long his civilised ways would last.
Jose Saramago
#80. We all know that each day that dawns is the first for some and will be the last for others, and that for most people it will be just another day.
Jose Saramago
#81. The period that I could consider the most important in my literary work came about beginning with the Revolution, and in a certain way, developed as a consequence of the Revolution. But it was also a result of the counterrevolutionary coup of November 1975.
Jose Saramago
#82. Do you mean that we have more words than we need, I mean that we have too few feelings, Or that we have them but have ceased to use the words they express, And so we lose them
Jose Saramago
#83. What torments people have to go through when they leave the safety of their homes to become embroiled in mad adventures.
Jose Saramago
#86. This is the way fate usually treats us, it's right there behind us, it has already reached out a hand to touch us on the shoulder while we're still muttering to ourselves, It's all over, that's it, who cares anyhow.
Jose Saramago
#87. Time and time again one has seen how stories get exaggerated in the telling.
Jose Saramago
#88. In a king, modesty would be a sign of weakness.
Jose Saramago
#89. When I think about it, I have no idea who you are, but that's not important, what matters is that we care about each other.
Jose Saramago
#90. Blindness is also this, to live in a world where all hope is gone.
Jose Saramago
#91. 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
#92. This is neither the time nor the place, however, to ponder how often the soul, in order to be able to boast of a clean body, has burdened itself with sadness, envy, and impurity.
Jose Saramago
#93.
I don't quite grasp your meaning.
Just as I don't quite understand what I am saying. But back to the point ... .
Jose Saramago
#94. It just isn't possible for you to ask me all the questions, or for me to give you all the answers.
Jose Saramago
#95. But the hidden meaning of life is that life has no hidden meaning. Abel knew Pessoa's poetry well.
Jose Saramago
#96. 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
#97. A journey never ends. Only the travellers end.
Jose Saramago
#98. In the end we discover the only condition for living is to die.
Jose Saramago
#99. Death has no need to be cruel, taking people's lives is more than enough.
Jose Saramago
#100. The church has never been asked to explain anything, our speciality, along with ballistics, has always been the neutralisation of the overly curious mind through faith.
Jose Saramago
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