Top 218 Quotes & Sayings by Jose Saramago - Page 3

The wise man contents himself with what he has, until such time as he invents something better.

We say Fine, even though we may be dying, and this is commonly known as taking one's courage in both hands, a phenomenon that has only been observed in the human species.

The history of mankind is the history of our misunderstandings with god, for he doesn't understand us, and we don't understand him.

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.

Every second that passes is like a door that opens to allow in what has not yet happened, what we call the future, but, to challenge the contradictory nature of what we have just said, perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the future is just an immense void, that the future is just the time on which the eternal present feeds.

Words have their own hierarchy, their own protocol, their own artistic titles, their own plebeian stigmas.

Globalization is a form of totalitarianism... It is the rich who rule, and the poor live as they can.

En ningún momento de la historia, en ningún lugar del planeta, las religiones han servido para que los seres humanos se acerquen unos a los otros. Por el contrario, sólo han servido para separar, para quemar, para torturar. No creo en dios, no lo necesito y además soy buena persona.

Age carries with it a double load of guilt.

a man was on his way to the gallows when he met another, who asked him: where are you going, my friend? and the condemned man replied: i'm not going anywhere. they're taking me by force.

. . . if there is a way for the world to be transformed for the better, it can only be done by pessimism; optimists will never change the world for the better.

Today's bread does not eliminate yesterday's hunger, much less that of tomorrow.

Life is like that, full of words that are not worth saying or that were worth saying once but not any more, each word that we utter will take up the space of another more deserving word, not deserving in its own right, but because of the possible consequences of saying it.

This is the effect of panic, a natural effect, you could say that animal nature is like this, plant life would behave in exactly the same way, too, if it did not have all those roots to hold it in the ground, and how nice it would be to see the trees of the forest fleeing the flames.

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.

Human nature is, by definition, a talkative one, imprudent, indiscreet, gossipy, incapable of closing its mouth and keeping it closed.

This must be what it means to be a ghost, being certain that life exists, because your four senses say so, and yet unable to see it.

The ear has to be educated if one wishes to appreciate musical sounds, just as the eyes must learn to distinguish the value of words.

We live in a very peculiar world. Democracy isn't discussed, as if it was taken for granted, as if democracy had taken God's place, who is also not discussed.

Death ... doesn't take her eyes off us for a minute, so much so that even those who are not yet due to die feel her gaze pursuing them constantly.

Abstention means you stayed at home or went to the beach. By casting a blank vote, you're saying that you understand your responsibility, you have a political conscience and you came to vote, but you don't agree with any of the existing parties and this is the only way you have of saying so.

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.

Blind people do not need a name, I am my voice, nothing else matters.

Nothing so tires a person as having to struggle, not with himself, but with an abstraction.

There is relationship between sight and touch, something about eyes being able to see through the fingers touching the clay, about fingers being able to feel what the eyes are seeing without the fingers actually touching it.

The minds of human beings are not always entirely at one with the world in which they live, some people have trouble adjusting to reality, basically they're just weak, confused spirits who use words, sometimes very skillfully, to justify their cowardice.

Earthenware is like people, it needs to be well treated.

As so often happens, the thing left undone tires you most of all, you only feel rested when it has been accomplished.

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.

A stomach accustomed to hunger is satisfied with very little.

Blessed be the night, which conceals and protects things fair and foul with the same indifferent mantle.

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.

We never consider that the things dogs know about us are things of which we have not the faintest notion.

There are those who deny me the right to speak of God, because I am not a believer. And I say that I have every right in the world. I want to talk about God because it is a problem that affects all humanity.

We all have our moments of weakness, just as well that we are still capable of weeping, tears are often our salvation, there are times when we would die if we did not weep - Blindness

The much-quoted immaculate conception of the Virgin Mary occurred but once so that the world might know that Almighty God, when He so chooses, has no need of men, though He cannot dispense with women.

Liking is probably the best form of ownership, and ownership the worst form of liking.

You never know beforehand what people are capable of, you have to wait, give it time, it's time that rules, time is our gambling partner on the other side of the table and it holds all the cards of the deck in its hand, we have to guess the winning cards of life, our lives.

In general, fakirs, like scribes and potters, are sitting down, when he's standing up, a fakir is just like an other man, and sitting down, he'll be smaller than the others.

Every novel is like this, desperation, a frustrated attempt to save something of the past. Except that it still has not been established whether it is the novel that prevents man from forgetting himself or the impossibility of forgetfulness that makes him write novels.

When all is said and done, what is clear is that all lives end before their time.

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.

Somewhere in the infinite that He occupies, God advances and withdraws the pawns of the other games He plays, but it is too soon to worry about this one, all He need do for the present is allow things to take their natural course, apart from the occasional adjustment with the tip of His little finger to make sure some stray thought or action does not interfere with the harmony of destinies.

It is not pornography that is obscene, it is hunger that is obscene.

The only time we can talk about death is while we're alive, not afterwards.

Don't be afraid, the darkness you're in is no greater than the darkness inside your own body, they are two darknesses separated by a skin, I bet you've never thought of that, you carry a darkness about with you all the time and that doesn't frighten you...my dear chap, you have to learn to live with the darkness outside just as you learned to live with the darkness inside

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.

Each part in itself constitutes the whole to which it belongs.

Lord knows why they depict death with wings when death is everywhere.

but it is also true, if this brings her any consolation, that if, before every action, we were to begin weighing up the consequences, thinking about them in earnest, first the immediate consequences, then the probably, then the possible, then the imaginable ones, we should never move beyond the point where our first thought brought us to a halt.

Everything in this world can volunteer some reply, what takes up time is posing the questions.

We know that happiness is short-lived, that we fail to cherish it when it is within our grasp and value it only when it has vanished forever.

A tree weeps when cut down, a dog howls when beaten, but a man matures when offended.

Often when you ask for one thing you receive another, this is the mysterious thing about prayer, we address them to heaven with some private intention, but they choose their own path, sometimes they delay, allowing other prayers to overtake them, frequently they overlap and become hybrid prayers of dubious origin, which quarrel and argue among themselves.

The sun appears in one of the upper corners of the rectangle, on the left of anyone looking at the picture.

One cannot be too careful with words, they change their minds just as people do.

For me, writing is a job. I do not separate the work from the act of writing like two things that have nothing to do with each other. I arrange words one after another, or one in front of another, to tell a story, to say something that I consider important or useful, or at least important or useful to me. It is nothing more than this.

We've all had our moments of weakness, and if we manage to get through today without any, we'll be sure to have some tomorrow.

One can show no greater respect than to weep for a stranger.

Sometimes I say that writing a novel is the same as constructing a chair: a person must be able to sit in it, to be balanced on it. If I can produce a great chair, even better. But above all I have to make sure that it has four stable feet.