110+ Jose Saramago Quotes (Imaginative, Provocative And Lyrical)

Jose Saramago was a Portuguese writer and Nobel Prize in Literature winner. He is best known for his 1998 novel "Blindness" and his 1995 novel "Baltasar and Blimunda". He was also a poet, playwright, and journalist, and wrote many philosophical works and essays.

Top 10 Jose Saramago Quotes

1. Inside us there is something that has no name, that something is what we are.
2. The world is governed by institutions that are not democratic - the World Bank, the IMF, the WTO.
3. I think we are blind, Blind but seeing, Blind people who can see, but do not see.
4. 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.
5. The novel is not so much a literary genre, but a literary space, like a sea that is filled by many rivers.
6. The U.S. needs to control the Middle East, the gateway to Asia. It already has military installations in Uzbekistan.
7. A journey never ends. Only the travellers end.
8. What kind of world is this that can send machines to Mars and does nothing to stop the killing of a human being?
9. No human being can achieve all he or she desires in this life except in dreams, so good night all.
10. 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.

Jose Saramago Short Quotes

• Even death, faced with the option of death or life, she would choose life.
• Blind people do not need a name, I am my voice, nothing else matters.
• Chaos is merely order waiting to be deciphered
• If I'm sincere today, what does it matter if I regret it tomorrow?
• Nothing so tires a person as having to struggle, not with himself, but with an abstraction.
• A stomach accustomed to hunger is satisfied with very little.
• Perhaps only in a world of the blind will things be what they truly are.
• The possibility of the impossible, dreams and illusions, are the subject of my novels.
• Forgive me if what has seemed little to you, to me is all.
• A woman is essentially a vessel made to be filled.

Jose Saramago Famous Quotes And Sayings

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. — Jose Saramago

The period that I could consider the most important in my literary work came about beginning with the Revolution, and in a certain way, developed as a consequence of the Revolution. But it was also a result of the counterrevolutionary coup of November 1975. — Jose Saramago

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. — Jose Saramago

A human being is a being who is constantly 'under construction,' but also, in a parallel fashion, always in a state of constant destruction. — Jose Saramago

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. — Jose Saramago

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

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

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. — Jose Saramago

Human nature is, by definition, a talkative one, imprudent, indiscreet, gossipy, incapable of closing its mouth and keeping it closed. — Jose Saramago

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. — Jose Saramago

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. — Jose Saramago

Can you imagine what Bush would say if someone like Hugo Chavez asked him for a little piece of land to install a military base, and he only wanted to plant a Venezuelan flag there? — Jose Saramago

Words have their own hierarchy, their own protocol, their own artistic titles, their own plebeian stigmas. — Jose Saramago

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. — Jose Saramago

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. — Jose Saramago

Abstention means you stayed at home or went to the beach. By casting a blank vote, you're saying that you understand your responsibility, you have a political conscience and you came to vote, but you don't agree with any of the existing parties and this is the only way you have of saying so. — Jose Saramago

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. — Jose Saramago

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. — Jose Saramago

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. — Jose Saramago

Things will be very bad for Latin America. You only have to consider the ambitions and the doctrines of the empire, which regards this region as its backyard. — Jose Saramago

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. — Jose Saramago

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? — Jose Saramago

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. — Jose Saramago

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. — Jose Saramago

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. — Jose Saramago

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? — Jose Saramago

For human words are like shadows, and shadows are incapable of explaining light and between shadow and light there is the opaque body from which words are born. — Jose Saramago

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. — Jose Saramago

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. — Jose Saramago

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. — Jose Saramago

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. — Jose 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. — Jose 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. — Jose Saramago

Every second that passes is like a door that opens to allow in what has not yet happened, what we call the future, but, to challenge the contradictory nature of what we have just said, perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the future is just an immense void, that the future is just the time on which the eternal present feeds. — Jose Saramago

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. — Jose 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.' — Jose Saramago

Everything in this world can volunteer some reply, what takes up time is posing the questions. — Jose Saramago

The wise man contents himself with what he has, until such time as he invents something better. — Jose Saramago

I am a person with leftist convictions, and always have been. — Jose Saramago

The best way to killing a rose is to force it open when it is still only the promise of a bud. — Jose Saramago

The attitude of insolent haughtiness is characteristic of the relationships Americans form with what is alien to them, with others. — Jose Saramago

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. — Jose 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. — Jose Saramago

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. — Jose Saramago

Today's bread does not eliminate yesterday's hunger, much less that of tomorrow. — Jose Saramago

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. — Jose 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. — Jose Saramago

When I am occupied with a work that requires continuity - a novel, for example - I write every day. — Jose Saramago

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. — Jose Saramago

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. — Jose Saramago

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

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 — Jose Saramago

we would understand much more about life’s complexities if we applied ourselves to an assiduous study of its contradictions, instead of wasting time on identities and coherences, seeing as these have a duty to provide their own explanations. — Jose Saramago

It is not pornography that is obscene, it is hunger that is obscene. — Jose Saramago

Blessed be the night, which conceals and protects things fair and foul with the same indifferent mantle. — Jose Saramago

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. — Jose Saramago

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. — Jose Saramago

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

As citizens, we all have an obligation to intervene and become involved - it's the citizen who changes things. — Jose Saramago

Creating is always so much more stimulating than destroying. — Jose Saramago

We are so afraid of the idea of having to die... that we always try to find excuses for the dead, as if we were asking beforehand to be excused when it is our turn. — Jose Saramago

In a king, modesty would be a sign of weakness. — Jose Saramago

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. — Jose Saramago

Will we ever learn that certain things can be understood only if we take the trouble to trace them to their origins. — Jose Saramago

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. — Jose Saramago

Writer's make national literature, while translators make universal literature. — Jose Saramago

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

a man was on his way to the gallows when he met another, who asked him: where are you going, my friend? and the condemned man replied: i'm not going anywhere. they're taking me by force. — Jose 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. — Jose Saramago

The history of mankind is the history of our misunderstandings with god, for he doesn't understand us, and we don't understand him. — Jose Saramago

There are times when it is best to be content with what one has, so as not to lose everything. — Jose Saramago

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

I believe that I've been asked all possible questions. I, myself, if I were a journalist, would not know what to ask me. — Jose Saramago

The beginning is never the clear, precise end of a thread, the beginning is a long, painfully slow process that requires time and patience in order to find out in which direction it is heading, a process that feels its way along the path ahead like a blind man the beginning is just the beginning, what came before is nigh on worthless. — Jose Saramago

The sun appears in one of the upper corners of the rectangle, on the left of anyone looking at the picture. — Jose Saramago

Death is the inventor of God. — Jose Saramago

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. — Jose 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. — Jose Saramago

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

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. — Jose Saramago

The virtue of maps, they show what can be done with limited space, they foresee that everything can happen therein. — Jose Saramago

Men are angels born without wings, nothing could be nicer than to be born without wings and to make them grow. — Jose Saramago

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

In the end we discover the only condition for living is to die. — Jose Saramago

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. — Jose Saramago

The amber light came on. — Jose Saramago

The wisest man I ever knew in my whole life could not read or write. — Jose Saramago

I write to try to understand, and because I have nothing better to do. — Jose Saramago

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

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

Life Lessons by Jose Saramago

1. Jose Saramago encourages readers to think critically and to question the status quo, emphasizing the importance of individual thought and action.
2. He teaches that life is full of unexpected turns and that it is important to remain open-minded and to take risks in order to find one's own path.
3. He also encourages readers to be compassionate and to recognize the interconnectedness of all living things, emphasizing the need for empathy and understanding.