Top 160 José Saramago Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “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.”

— José Saramago

52. “Reading is probably another way of being in a place.”

— José Saramago

53. “I am a person with leftist convictions, and always have been.”

— José Saramago

54. “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

55. “If we cannot live entirely like human beings, at least let us do everything in our power not to live entirely like animals.”

— José Saramago

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

— José Saramago

57. “The novel is not so much a literary genre, but a literary space, like a sea that is filled by many rivers.”

— José Saramago

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

— José Saramago

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

— José Saramago

60. “You know the name you were given, you do not know the name that you have.”

— José Saramago

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

— José Saramago

62. “A woman is essentially a vessel made to be filled.”

— José Saramago

63. “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.”

— José Saramago

64. “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.”

— José Saramago

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

— José Saramago

66. “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.”

— José Saramago

67. “I always ask two questions: How many countries have military bases in the United States? And in how many countries does the United States not have military bases?”

— José Saramago

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

— José Saramago

69. “Strictly speaking, we do not make decisions. Decisions make us.”

— José Saramago

70. “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?”

— José Saramago

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

— José Saramago

72. “Americans have discovered the fragility of life, that ominous fragility that the rest of the world either already experienced or is experiencing now with terrible intensity.”

— José Saramago

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

— José Saramago

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

— José Saramago

75. “Without the faintest possibility of finding a job, I decided to devote myself to literature: it was about time to find out what I was worth as a writer.”

— José Saramago

76. “People live with the illusion that we have a democratic system, but it’s only the outward form of one. In reality we live in a plutocracy, a government of the rich.”

— José Saramago

77. “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

78. “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

79. “Ah, in every age there is always some new wonder to astound mankind until they grow accustomed to it and lose interest.”

— José Saramago

80. “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...”

— José Saramago

81. “In a king, modesty would be a sign of weakness.”

— José Saramago

82. “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.”

— José Saramago

83. “Age carries with it a double load of guilt.”

— José Saramago

84. “In the end we discover the only condition for living is to die.”

— José Saramago

85. “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

86. “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.”

— José Saramago

87. “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.”

— José Saramago

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

— José Saramago

89. “I can’t imagine myself outside any kind of social or political involvement. Yes, I’m a writer, but I live in this world, and my writing doesn’t exist on a separate level. And if people know who I am and read my books, well, good; that way, if I have something more to say, then everyone benefits.”

— José Saramago

90. “I believe myself to be the type of person who does not complicate his life. I have always lived my life without dramatizing things, whether the good things that have happened to me or the bad. I simply live those moments.”

— José Saramago

91. “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

92. “Being fired was the best luck of my life. It made me stop and reflect. It was the birth of my life as a writer.”

— José Saramago

93. “In the end, I am quite normal. I don’t have odd habits. I don’t dramatize. Above all, I do not romanticize the act of writing. I don’t talk about the anguish I suffer in creating. I do not have a fear of the blank page, writer’s block, all those things that we hear about writers.”

— José Saramago

94. “Will we ever learn that certain things can be understood only if we take the trouble to trace them to their origins.”

— José Saramago

95. “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.”

— José Saramago

96. “Perfect moments, especially when they verge on the sublime have the grave disadvantage of being very short lived, which in fact, being obvious, we would not need to mention were it not that they have a still greater disadvantage, which is that we do not know what to do once they are over.”

— José Saramago

97. “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.”

— José Saramago

98. “Though I had come into the world on 16 November 1922, my official documents show that I was born two days later, on the 18th. It was thanks to this petty fraud that my family escaped from paying the fine for not having registered my birth at the proper legal time.”

— José Saramago

99. “I was born in a family of landless peasants, in Azinhaga, a small village in the province of Ribatejo, on the right bank of the Almonda River, around a hundred kilometres north-east of Lisbon.”

— José Saramago

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

— José Saramago