Jose Saramago Quotes

The world is governed by institutions that are not democratic - the World Bank, the IMF, the WTO.

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

Inside us there is something that has no name, that something is what we are.

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.

The novel is not so much a literary genre, but a literary space, like a sea that is filled by many rivers.

The U.S. needs to control the Middle East, the gateway to Asia. It already has military installations in Uzbekistan.

Words that come from the heart are never spoken, they get caught in the throat and can only be read in ones's eyes.

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.

Some people spend their entire lives reading but never get beyond reading the words on the page, they don't understand that the words are merely stepping stones placed across a fast-flowing river, and the reason they're there is so that we can reach the farther shore, it's the other side that matters...

A journey never ends. Only the travellers end.

What kind of world is this that can send machines to Mars and does nothing to stop the killing of a human being?

We use words to understand each other and even, sometimes, to find each other.

No human being can achieve all he or she desires in this life except in dreams, so good night all.

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.

There are such moments in life, when, in order for heaven to open, it is necessary for a door to close.

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.

Each day is a little bit of history

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.

We are finally living in Plato's cave, if we consider how those who were imprisoned within the cave - who could do nothing but watch those shadows passing on the back wall - were convinced that those shadows were their one and only reality. I see a profound similarity to all this in the epoch we're now living in. We no longer live simply through images: we live through images that don't even exist, which are the result not of physical projection but of pure virtuality.

...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.

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

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

Chaos is merely order waiting to be deciphered

We can escape from everything, but not from ourselves.

Blind people do not need a name, I am my voice, nothing else matters.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

If I'm sincere today, what does it matter if I regret it tomorrow?

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.

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

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?

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.

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

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.

Strictly speaking, we do not make decisions. Decisions make us.

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

Nothing so tires a person as having to struggle, not with himself, but with an abstraction.

One cannot be too careful with words, they change their minds just as people do.

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

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

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.

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.

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

Reading is probably another way of being in a place.