Top 160 José Saramago Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “A journey never ends. Only the travellers end.”

— José Saramago

2. “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

3. “Chaos is merely order waiting to be deciphered.”

— José Saramago

4. “Each day is a little bit of history.”

— José Saramago

5. “Inside us there is something that has no name, that something is what we are.”

— José Saramago

6. “Writer’s make national literature, while translators make universal literature.”

— José Saramago

7. “If I’m sincere today, what does it matter if I regret it tomorrow?”

— José Saramago

8. “What kind of world is this that can send machines to Mars and does nothing to stop the killing of a human being?”

— José Saramago

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

— José Saramago

10. “The difficult thing isn’t living with other people, it’s understanding them.”

— José Saramago

11. “Just as the habit does not make the monk, the sceptre does not make the king.”

— José Saramago

12. “Doesn’t anybody understand that killing in the name of God only makes Him a murderer?”

— José Saramago

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

— José Saramago

14. “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.”

— José Saramago

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

— José Saramago

16. “We can escape from everything, but not from ourselves.”

— José Saramago

17. “A human being is a being who is constantly ‘under construction,’ but also, in a parallel fashion, always in a state of constant destruction.”

— José Saramago

18. “Words were not given to man in order to conceal his thoughts.”

— José Saramago

19. “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.”

— José Saramago

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

— José Saramago

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

— José Saramago

22. “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

23. “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.”

— José Saramago

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

— José Saramago

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

— José Saramago

26. “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.”

— José Saramago

27. “There is nothing that is truly free nor democratic enough. Make no mistake, the internet did not come to save the world.”

— José Saramago

28. “Death has no need to be cruel, taking people’s lives is more than enough.”

— José Saramago

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

— José Saramago

30. “As citizens, we all have an obligation to intervene and become involved – it’s the citizen who changes things.”

— José Saramago

31. “Death is the inventor of God.”

— José Saramago

32. “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.”

— José Saramago

33. “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

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

— José Saramago

35. “It is economic power that determines political power, and governments become the political functionaries of economic power.”

— José Saramago

36. “The world is governed by institutions that are not democratic – the World Bank, the IMF, the WTO.”

— José Saramago

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

— José Saramago

38. “The wisest man I ever knew in my whole life could not read or write.”

— José Saramago

39. “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.”

— José Saramago

40. “The only time we can talk about death is while we’re alive, not afterwards.”

— José Saramago

41. “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.”

— José Saramago

42. “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.”

— José Saramago

43. “Your questions are false if you already know the answer.”

— José Saramago

44. “Today’s bread does not eliminate yesterday’s hunger, much less that of tomorrow.”

— José Saramago

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

— José Saramago

46. “Human vocabulary is still not capable, and probably never will be, of knowing, recognizing, and communicating everything that can be humanly experienced and felt.”

— José Saramago

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

— José Saramago

48. “It takes little or nothing to undo reputations, the merest trifle makes and remakes them, it is simply a question of finding the best means of engaging the confidence or interest of those who are to become one’s unsuspecting echoes or accomplices.”

— José Saramago

49. “I do not just write, I write what I am. If there is a secret, perhaps that is it.”

— José Saramago

50. “There are plenty of reasons not to put up with the world as it is.”

— José Saramago