José Saramago Quotes

It’s is the old who age a day every hour,

The question suddenly came into my head, 'And if we were all blind?' And then immediately, as if answering myself, 'But we are all blind.'

He felt very tired, not from the mental effort, but because he had suddenly seen what the world was like, how there are many lies and truths,

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

Destiny isn’t taken in by people trying to make what came first come afterwards.

Todo o romance é isso, desespero, intento frustrado de que o passado não seja coisa definitivamente perdida. Só não se acabou ainda de averiguar se é o romance que impede o homem de esquecer-se ou se é a impossibilidade do esquecimento que o leva a escrever romances.

Se podes olhar, vê. Se podes ver, repara.

Intoxicated mentally by the messianic dream of a Greater Israel which will finally achieve the expansionist dreams of the most radical Zionism; contaminated by the monstrous and rooted 'certitude' that in this catastrophic and absurd world there exists a people chosen by God and that, consequently, all the actions of an obsessive, psychological and pathologically exclusivist racism are justified; educated and trained in the idea that any suffering that has been inflicted, or is being inflicted, or will be inflicted on everyone else, especially the Palestinians, will always be inferior to that which they themselves suffered in the Holocaust, the Jews endlessly scratch their own wound to keep it bleeding, to make it incurable, and they show it to the world as if it were a banner.

We would know far more about life’s complexities if we applied ourselves to the close study of its contradictions instead of wasting so much time on similarities and connections, which should anyway, be self-explanatory.

The caressing, melodious tones of humility and flattery never sang in the ears of the clerk Senhor José, these have never had a place in the chromatic scale of feelings normally shown to him.

A propósito, não resistiremos a recordar que a morte, por si mesma, sozinha, sem qualquer ajuda externa, sempre matou muito menos que o homem.

Então Jesus voltou lentamente o rosto para ela e disse. Não conheço mulher. Maria segurou-lhe as mãos, Assim temos de começar todos, homens que não conheciam mulher, mulheres que não conheciam homem, um dia o que sabia ensinou, o que não sabia aprendeu.

The bread was dry and hard, only a scraping of butter was left, he was out of milk, all he had was some rather mediocre coffee, as we know, a man who had never found a woman who would love him enough to agree to join him in this hovel, such a man, apart from rare exceptions which have no place in this story, will never be more than a poor devil, it's odd that we always say poor devil and never poor god, [...]

If we cannot live entirely like human beings, at least let us do everything in our power not to live entirely like animals.

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.