José Saramago Quotes

147 Sourced Quotes

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

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
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
The skin is only what we want others to see of us, underneath it not even we know who we are.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

José Saramago
To me, the Bible is a book. Important, no doubt, but a book.

José Saramago
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,

José Saramago
He felt very tired, not from the mental effort, but because he had suddenly seen what the world was like, how there are many lies and truths,

José Saramago
Some drivers have already got out of their cars, prepared to push the stranded vehicle to a spot where it will not hold up the traffic, they beat furiously on the closed windows, the man inside turns his head in their direction, first to one side then to the other, he is clearly shouting something, to judge by the movements of his mouth he appears to be repeating some words, no one word but three, as turns out to be the case when someone finally manages to open the door, I am blind.

José Saramago
We would know far more about life's complexities if we applied ourselves to the close study of its contradictions instead of wasting so much time on similarities and connections, which should anyway, be self-explanatory.

José Saramago
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

José Saramago
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.

José Saramago
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.

José Saramago
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.

José Saramago
The caressing, melodious tones of humility and flattery never sang in the ears of the clerk Senhor José, these have never had a place in the chromatic scale of feelings normally shown to him.

José Saramago