Jose Saramago Quotes

...the habit of falling hardens the body, reaching the ground, to in itself, is a relief.

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

The difficult thing isn't living with other people, it's understanding them.

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

...you have to leave the island in order to see the island, that we can't see ourselves unless we become free of ourselves, Unless we escape from ourselves you mean, No, that's not the same thing.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

That is the dream of all novelists-that one of their characters will become 'somebody.'

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.

The world is governed by institutions that are not democratic - the World Bank, the IMF, the WTO.

Your questions are false if you already know the answer.

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.

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

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.

doubt is the privilege of those who have lived a long time

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

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

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.

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.

The worst pain ... isn't the pain you feel at the time, it's the pain you feel later on when there's nothing you can do about it, They say that time heals all wounds, But we never live long enough to test that theory.

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

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.

In a king, modesty would be a sign of weakness.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

It is not pornography that is obscene, it is hunger that is obscene.

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.

En ningún momento de la historia, en ningún lugar del planeta, las religiones han servido para que los seres humanos se acerquen unos a los otros. Por el contrario, sólo han servido para separar, para quemar, para torturar. No creo en dios, no lo necesito y además soy buena persona.

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.

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.

Dignity has no price ... when someone starts making small concessions, in the end life loses all meaning.

A stomach accustomed to hunger is satisfied with very little.

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.

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.

The day before is what we bring to the day we're actually living through, life is a matter of carrying along all those days-before just as someone might carry stones, and when we can no longer cope with the load, the work is done, the last day is the only one that is not the day before another day.

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

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.

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.

Globalization is a form of totalitarianism... It is the rich who rule, and the poor live as they can.

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

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