José Saramago Quotes

The day before is what we bring to the day we’re actually living through, life is a matter of carrying along all those days-before just as someone might carry stones, and when we can no longer cope with the load, the work is done, the last day is the only one that is not the day before another day.

Words are like that, they deceive, they pile up, it seems they do not know where to go, and, suddenly, because of two or three or four that suddenly come out, simple in themselves, a personal pronoun, an adverb, an adjective, we have the excitement of seeing them coming irresistibly to the surface through the skin and the eyes and upsetting the composure of our feelings, sometimes the nerves that can not bear it any longer, they put up with a great deal, they put up with everything, it was as if they were wearing armor, we might say.

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.

A woman is essentially a vessel made to be filled.

I am traveling less in order to be able to write more. I select my travel destinations according to their degree of usefulness to my work.

There are times when it is best to be content with what one has, so as not to lose everything.

The wise man contents himself with what he has, until such time as he invents something better.

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.

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.

Whether we like it or not, the one justification for the existence of all religions is death, they need death as much as we need bread to eat.

but it is also true, if this brings her any consolation, that if, before every action, we were to begin weighing up the consequences, thinking about them in earnest, first the immediate consequences, then the probably, then the possible, then the imaginable ones, we should never move beyond the point where our first thought brought us to a halt.