Top 160 José Saramago Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “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

102. “But truths need to be repeated many times so that they don’t, poor things, lapse into oblivion.”

— José Saramago

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

— José Saramago

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

— José Saramago

105. “Death is present every day in our lives. It’s not that I take pleasure in the morbid fascination of it, but it is a fact of life.”

— José Saramago

106. “We’re not short of movements proclaiming that a different world is possible, but unless we can coordinate them into an international movement, capitalism just laughs at all these little organisations.”

— José Saramago

107. “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

108. “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

109. “I had no books at home. I started to frequent a public library in Lisbon. It was there, with no help except curiosity and the will to learn, that my taste for reading developed and was refined.”

— José Saramago

110. “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

111. “We are marching against the law of the jungle that the United States and its acolytes old and new want to impose on the world...”

— José Saramago

112. “I never appreciated ‘positive heroes’ in literature. They are almost always cliches, copies of copies, until the model is exhausted. I prefer perplexity, doubt, uncertainty, not just because it provides a more ‘productive’ literary raw material, but because that is the way we humans really are.”

— José Saramago

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

— José Saramago

114. “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.”

— José Saramago

115. “Society has to change, but the political powers we have at the moment are not enough to effect this change. The whole democratic system would have to be rethought.”

— José Saramago

116. “That it’s possible not to see a lie even when it’s in front of us.”

— José Saramago

117. “I am the same person I was before receiving the Nobel Prize. I work with the same regularity, I have not modified my habits, I have the same friends.”

— José Saramago

118. “From literature to ecology, from the escape velocity of galaxies to the greenhouse effect, from garbage disposal methods to traffic jams, everything is discussed in our world. But the democratic system, as if it were a given fact, untouchable by nature until the end of time, we don’t discuss that.”

— José Saramago

119. “The attitude of insolent haughtiness is characteristic of the relationships Americans form with what is alien to them, with others.”

— José Saramago

120. “The time for miracles has either passed or not come yet, besides, miracles, genuine miracles, whatever people say, are not such a good idea, if it means destroying the very order of things in order to improve them.”

— José Saramago

121. “There is nothing healthier for a man than to walk on his own two legs.”

— José Saramago

122. “The painter paints, the musician makes music, the novelist writes novels. But I believe that we all have some influence, not because of the fact that one is an artist, but because we are citizens.”

— José Saramago

123. “With the passage of time, as well as the social evolution and genetic exchange, we ended up putting our conscience in the color of our blood and the salt of our tears.”

— José Saramago

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

— José Saramago

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

— José Saramago

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

— José Saramago

127. “A stomach accustomed to hunger is satisfied with very little.”

— José Saramago

128. “Look what happened with the employment law in France-the law was withdrawn because the people marched in the streets. I think what we need is a global protest movement of people who won’t give up.”

— José Saramago

129. “Beginning with adolescence, my political formation was oriented in the ideological direction of Marxism. It was natural, being that my thinking was influenced by an atmosphere of active critical resistance. That was the way it was during all of the dictatorship and up to the Revolution of 1974.”

— José Saramago

130. “If I could repeat my childhood, I would repeat it exactly as it was, with the poverty, the cold, little food, with the flies and pigs, all that.”

— José Saramago

131. “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.”

— José Saramago

132. “I was a good pupil at primary school: in the second class I was writing with no spelling mistakes, and the third and fourth classes were done in a single year.”

— José Saramago

133. “I write to try to understand, and because I have nothing better to do.”

— José Saramago

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

— José Saramago

135. “In effect I am not a novelist, but rather a failed essayist who started to write novels because he didn’t know how to write essays.”

— José Saramago

136. “Oh, I’m not just going too far, I’ve arrived.”

— José Saramago

137. “It is difficult to understand these people who democratically take part in elections and a referendum, but are then incapable of democratically accepting the will of the people.”

— José Saramago

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

— José Saramago

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

— José Saramago

140. “Perhaps it is the language that chooses the writers it needs, making use of them so that each might express a tiny part of what it is.”

— José Saramago

141. “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.”

— José Saramago

142. “At the end of the 1950s, I started working at a publishing company, Estudios Cor, as production manager, so returning, but not as an author, to the world of letters I had left some years before.”

— José Saramago

143. “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.”

— José Saramago

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

— José Saramago

145. “Creating is always so much more stimulating than destroying.”

— José Saramago

146. “I am a better novelist than a poet, playwright, or essayist.”

— José Saramago

147. “I presume that nobody will deny the positive aspects of the North American cultural world. These are well known to all. But these aspects do not make one forget the disastrous effects of the industrial and commercial process of ‘cultural lamination’ that the USA is perpetrating on the planet.”

— José Saramago

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

— José Saramago

149. “Consciences keep silence more often than they should, that’s why laws were created.”

— José Saramago

150. “I am traveling less in order to be able to write more. I select my travel destinations according to their degree of usefulness to my work.”

— José Saramago