José Saramago Quotes

What the eye doesn’t see the heart doesn’t grieve over.

Le religioni, tutte, senza eccezione, non serviranno mai per avvicinare e riconciliare gli uomini e, al contrario, sono state e continuano a essere causa di sofferenze inenarrabili, di stragi, di mostruose violenze fisiche e spirituali che costituiscono uno dei più tenebrosi capitoli della misera storia umana.

He spent the whole time sitting on a log in the woodshed, sometimes starting straight ahead with the fixity of a blind man who knows that even if he turns his head in the other direction he will still not see anything,

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.

Once the machine starts to fly, the heavens will be filled with music.

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

The emptiness of old age had caused him to forget that, in matters of feeling and of the heart, too much is always better than too little.

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.

Don’t quibble with the king over pears, let him eat the ripe ones and give you the green ones.

Fate [is] the supreme order to which even gods are subject. And what of men, what is their function. To challenge order, to change fate. For the better. For better or for worse, it makes no difference, the point is to keep fate from being fate.

Nossa maior tragédia é não saber o que fazer com a vida.

[...], indeed nothing so tires a person as having to struggle, not with himself, but with an abstraction.

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.

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

Nobody performs her or his duties. Governments do not, because they do not know, they are not able or they do not wish, or because they are not permitted by those who effectively govern the world: The multinational and pluricontinental companies whose power — absolutely non-democratic — reduce to next to nothing what is left of the ideal of democracy. We citizens are not fulfilling our duties either. Let us think that no human rights will exist without symmetry of the duties that correspond to them. It is not to be expected that governments in the next 50 years will do it. Let us common citizens therefore speak up. With the same vehemence as when we demanded our rights, let us demand responsibility over our duties. Perhaps the world could turn a little better.