Explore Quotes by Jose Saramago

I think we are blind, Blind but seeing, Blind people who can see, but do not see.

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

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

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

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?

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

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

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.

Each day is a little bit of history

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.

Jeronimo, my grandfather, swine-herder and story-teller, feeling death about to arrive and take him, went and said goodbye to the trees in the yard, one by one, embracing them and crying because he knew he wouldn't see them again. To truly appreciate life we must remember that nothing lasts for ever and take nothing we enjoy for granted. In so doing we stay grateful and happy for all our good fortune.

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.

A journey never ends. Only the travellers end.

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

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.

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?

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.

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

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

The only miracle we can perform is to go on living, said the woman, to preserve the fragility of life from day to day, as if it were blind and did not know where to go, and perhaps it is like that, perhaps it really does not know, it placed itself in our hands, after giving us intelligence.

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