José Saramago Quotes

147 Sourced Quotes

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.

José Saramago
Inside us there is something that has no name, that something is what we are.

José Saramago
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.

José Saramago
At this time of life even a day makes a difference, the only saving grace is that sometimes things improve.

José Saramago
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'.

José Saramago
[...], old photographs are very deceiving, they give us the illusion that we are alive in them, and it's not true, the person we are looking at no longer exists, and if that person could see us, he or she would not recognise him or herself in us, Who's that looking at me so sadly, he or she would say.

José Saramago
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...

José Saramago
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?

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

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

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

José Saramago
We humans are, at bottom, carriers of the time, because we take it with us, we use it, sometimes we waste it and sometimes something remains, though everything is doomed to oblivion.

José Saramago
… because contrary to what people say, two weaknesses don't make for a still greater weakness, but for renewed strength...

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

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

José Saramago
Just as the habit does not make the monk, the sceptre does not make the king.

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

José Saramago
[...], indeed nothing so tires a person as having to struggle, not with himself, but with an abstraction.

José Saramago
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.

José Saramago
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.

José Saramago
So often we need a whole lifetime in order to change our life, we think a great deal, weigh things up and vacillate, then we go back to the beginning, we think and think, we displace ourselves on the tracks of time with a circular movement, like those clouds of dust, dead leaves, debris, that have no strength for anything more, better by far that we should live in a land of hurricanes.

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

José Saramago
Where do begin, he asked, Where you always have to begin, at the beginning,

José Saramago
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.

José Saramago
I don't doubt that a man can live perfectly well on his own, but I'm convinced that he begins to die as soon as he closes the door of his house behind him.

José Saramago
The virtue of maps, they show what can be done with limited space, they foresee that everything can happen therein.

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

José Saramago
There are times when it is best to be content with what one has, so as not to lose everything.

José Saramago
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.

José Saramago
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

José Saramago