Jose Saramago Quotes - Page 3

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.

just like everything else in life, let time take its course and it will find a solution.

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?

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

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

A woman is essentially a vessel made to be filled.

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.

... that's how life should be, when one person loses heart, the other must have heart and courage enough for both.

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

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.

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

...sometimes we ask ourselves why happiness took so long to arrive, why it didn't come sooner, but appears suddenly, as now, when we've given up hope of it ever arriving, it's likely then that we won't know what to do, and rather than it being a question of choosing between laughter and tears, we will be filled by a secret anxiety to which we might not know how to respond at all.

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

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

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.

In matters of feeling and of the heart, too much is always better than too little.

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

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

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

Reading is probably another way of being in a place.

Writer's make national literature, while translators make universal literature.

...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.

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

Death is the inventor of God.

The problem is that the right doesn't need any ideas to govern, but the left can't govern without ideas.