Top 218 Quotes & Sayings by Jose Saramago - Page 2

just like everything else in life, let time take its course and it will find a solution.

But truths need to be repeated many times so that they don't, poor things, lapse into oblivion.

Your questions are false if you already know the answer.

Even death, faced with the option of death or life, she would choose life.

As my cat would say, all hours are good for sleeping.

We can escape from everything, but not from ourselves.

If you don't write your books, nobody else will do it for you. No one else has lived your life.

Strictly speaking, we do not make decisions. Decisions make us.

That it's possible not to see a lie even when it's in front of us.

The wisest man I ever knew in my whole life could not read or write. At four o'clock in the morning, when the promise of a new day still lingered over French lands, he got up from his pallet and left for the fields, taking to pasture the half-dozen pigs whose fertility nourished him and his wife.

all stories are like those about the creation of the universe, no one was there, no one witnessed anything, yet everyone knows what happened.

I think we are blind, Blind but seeing, Blind people who can see, but do not see.

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.

Not only does the universe have its own laws, all of them indifferent to the contradictory dreams and desires of humanity, and in the formulation of which we contribute not one iota, apart, that is, from the words by which we clumsily name them, but everything seems to indicate that it uses these laws for aims and objectives that transcend and always will transcend our understanding.

Reading is probably another way of being in a place.

We use words to understand each other and even, sometimes, to find each other.

The best way to killing a rose is to force it open when it is still only the promise of a bud.

Dignity has no price ... when someone starts making small concessions, in the end life loses all meaning.

It is strange how the elderly fall silent when they ought to go on speaking, obliging the young to learn everything from scratch.

Men are angels born without wings, nothing could be nicer than to be born without wings and to make them grow.

Perhaps only in a world of the blind will things be what they truly are.

blindness is a private matter between a person and the eyes with which he or she was born.

There are such moments in life, when, in order for heaven to open, it is necessary for a door to close.

Some people spend their entire lives reading but never get beyond reading the words on the page, they don't understand that the words are merely stepping stones placed across a fast-flowing river, and the reason they're there is so that we can reach the farther shore, it's the other side that matters...

No human being can achieve all he or she desires in this life except in dreams, so good night all.

Chaos is merely order waiting to be deciphered

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?

Jeronimo, my grandfather, swine-herder and story-teller, feeling death about to arrive and take him, went and said goodbye to the trees in the yard, one by one, embracing them and crying because he knew he wouldn't see them again. To truly appreciate life we must remember that nothing lasts for ever and take nothing we enjoy for granted. In so doing we stay grateful and happy for all our good fortune.

Forgive me if what has seemed little to you, to me is all.

Sleep is a skilled magician, it changes the proportions of things, the distances between them, it separates people and they're lying next to each other, brings them together and they can barely see one another.

A woman is essentially a vessel made to be filled.

There is nothing healthier for a man than to walk on his own two legs.

when you are old and realize that time is running out, you start imagining that you have the cure for all the ills of the world in your hand, and get frustrated because no one pays you any attention.

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.

Creating is always so much more stimulating than destroying.

Every thing in life is a uniform; the only time our bodies are truly in civilian dress is when we're naked.

God, the devil, good, evil, it's all in our heads, not in Heaven or Hell, which we also invented. We do not realize that, having invented God, we immediately became His slaves.

In matters of feeling and of the heart, too much is always better than too little.

... that's how life should be, when one person loses heart, the other must have heart and courage enough for both.

We are finally living in Plato's cave, if we consider how those who were imprisoned within the cave - who could do nothing but watch those shadows passing on the back wall - were convinced that those shadows were their one and only reality. I see a profound similarity to all this in the epoch we're now living in. We no longer live simply through images: we live through images that don't even exist, which are the result not of physical projection but of pure virtuality.

Writer's make national literature, while translators make universal literature.

Consciences keep silence more often than they should, that's why laws were created.

I write to try to understand, and because I have nothing better to do.

A journey never ends. Only the travellers end.

The worst pain ... isn't the pain you feel at the time, it's the pain you feel later on when there's nothing you can do about it, They say that time heals all wounds, But we never live long enough to test that theory.

The difficult thing isn't living with other people, it's understanding them.

...sometimes we ask ourselves why happiness took so long to arrive, why it didn't come sooner, but appears suddenly, as now, when we've given up hope of it ever arriving, it's likely then that we won't know what to do, and rather than it being a question of choosing between laughter and tears, we will be filled by a secret anxiety to which we might not know how to respond at all.

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?

Why did we become blind, I don't know, perhaps one day we'll find out, Do you want me to tell you what I think, Yes, do, 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.

Death is the inventor of God.

The possibility of the impossible, dreams and illusions, are the subject of my novels.

doubt is the privilege of those who have lived a long time

If I'm sincere today, what does it matter if I regret it tomorrow?

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.

...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.

Words that come from the heart are never spoken, they get caught in the throat and can only be read in ones's eyes.

Each day is a little bit of history

That is the dream of all novelists-that one of their characters will become 'somebody.'

Doesn't anybody understand that killing in the name of God only makes Him a murderer?

In a king, modesty would be a sign of weakness.