I leave you the best phrases of José Saramago (1922-2010), Portuguese writer who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1998. His works usually present subversive perspectives on historical events, emphasizing the human factor.
Born in Portugal, in the bosom of a humble family, Saramago lived the Salazar dictatorship from beginning to end, a fact that would have a profound impact on his political ideology, declaring himself a man of the left.
To date, his works have been translated into more than 25 languages. However, throughout his life, Saramago received harsh criticism from major world entities.
Among them are the Catholic Church or the International Monetary Fund, which disagreed with the humanist and communist ideals of the writer. In 2010, at the age of 87, Saramago succumbed to the leukemia he had been battling for years.
You may also be interested in these phrases of great philosophers.
The best quotes from Saramago
-The human being did not receive the gift of the word to hide his thoughts.
-The wise man is satisfied with what he has until he invents something better.
-The wisest man I have ever met in my life could neither read nor write.
-They say that time heals wounds, but no one has lived long enough to prove this theory.
-Just like the habit does not make the monk, the scepter does not make the king.
-Death need not be cruel. Taking someone's life is more than enough.
-Every day that passes is a bit of history.
-We can escape from everything except ourselves.
-The worst pain is not the one you feel at the moment, but the one you feel later when there is nothing you can do.
-The marriage is made up of three people: the man, the woman and a third person, the most important, which is made up of the man and the woman equally.
-Chaos is nothing more than order waiting to be deciphered.
-Your questions are false if you already know the answers.
-The problem is that the right does not need any ideal to govern, while the left cannot govern without ideals.
-There are too many reasons not to tolerate the world we have now.
-You can never be too careful with words, as they change your mind just as quickly as people.
-As citizens, we all have the obligation to intervene and get involved. It is the citizen who changes things.
-There is nothing dramatic about death, except that you lose your life.
-The final death of a writer takes place when absolutely no one reads his books. That is true death.
-It is economic power that determines political power, which is why governments become political puppets of economic power.
-The human is a being that is constantly under construction, but also, and in a parallel way, always in a state of destruction.
-It may be that the language chooses the writers it needs, making use of them so that each one expresses a minimum part of what it really is.
-I don't just write, but I write what I am.
-Universal love has never existed and will never exist.
-The world is governed by undemocratic institutions: the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization, etc.
-The novel draws on science, philosophy, poetry, etc. It is not simply about telling a story.
-The novel is not a literary genre, but a literary space, like a sea that feeds on many rivers.
- What kind of world is this that can send machines to Mars, but remains impassive before the slaughter of human beings?
-I think we are blind; blind who can see, but do not see.
-In our interior there is something that has no name, but that is what we are.
-We do not lack social movements demanding a different world, but if we do not coordinate internationally, capitalism simply laughs at these small organizations.
-I think I am a person who does not complicate life. I have always lived my life without dramatizing, trying to live every moment, be it good or bad.
-Having been fired is the best thing that has happened to me in life. It made me stop to reflect. It was my birth as a writer.
-Things are going to go very bad for Latin America. We simply have to take into account the ambitions and doctrines of the empire, which regards that region as its backyard.
-I always ask two questions: how many countries have military bases in the United States? In how many countries does the United States have military bases?
-At the end of our lives we discover that the only condition for living is death.
-Sometimes it is better to settle for what one has in order not to lose everything.
-The consciences remain silent more than they should.
-The attitude of insolent arrogance is typical of the relationships that Americans form with what is strange to them.
- I am a person of convictions of the left, and I always have been.
-I'm not really a novelist, but a failed essayist who started writing novels because he didn't know how to write essays.
-The human vocabulary is not yet capable, and probably never will be, of knowing, recognizing and communicating everything that the human being lives and feels.
-Every second that passes is a door to the future. But perhaps it is more accurate to say that the future is an immense void from which the eternal present feeds.
-I do not doubt that man can live alone perfectly, but I am convinced that he begins to die as soon as he closes the door of his house behind him.
-It is incomprehensible that there are people who participate in elections and referendums in a democratic way, and then are unable to accept the democratic will of the people.
-I'm traveling less so I can write more. I choose my destinations depending on their usefulness for my work.
-I do not imagine myself outside of any social or political movement. Yes, I am a writer, but I live in this world and my writing does not exist in a parallel reality.
-Death is present every day of our lives. Not that it produces a morbid fascination in me, but it is one of the truths of life.
-Society has to change, but the political powers that we currently possess are not enough to effect this change. To do this, the entire democratic system would have to be redesigned.
-I was a good student in Primary. In second grade I did not make spelling mistakes, and third and fourth I made them in a single year.
-The painter paints, the musician composes, the novelist writes novels. But I think we all have some common influence; not because of being artists, but because of being citizens.
-I am a better novelist than a poet, playwright or essayist.
-The Americans have discovered fear.
-I'm not a prophet.
-To continue living, we have to die. That is the history of humanity, generation after generation.
-Can you imagine what Bush would say if someone like Hugo Chávez asked him for a bit of land to install a military base and put up a Venezuelan flag?
-The world had already changed before September 11. The world has been changing for about 20 or 30 years. One civilization disappears while another is born.
-Without a remote possibility of finding work, I devoted myself exclusively to literature. It was time to find out what he was worth as a writer.
-The United States needs to control the Middle East, the entrance to Asia.
-If I'm sincere today, what does it matter if I regret it tomorrow?
-The difficulty is not in living with other people, the difficult thing is to understand them.
-We use words to understand each other, and sometimes to find each other.
-Excuse me if what is small for you, is everything for me.
-The words that come from the heart are never said, they get stuck in the throat and can only be read in the eyes of others.
-Reading is probably another way of being in a place.
-Maybe only in a blind world things would see as they really are.
-Like it or not, the only justification for the existence of all religions is death, we need death as much as bread to eat.
-Men are all the same, they think that because they come from a woman's womb they know everything there is to know about women.
-You know the name that was given to you, but you don't know the name you have.
-In matters of feelings and heart, a lot is always better than very little.
-Like is probably the best way to possess, and to own is the worst way to like.
-If we cannot live as human beings, at least let us do everything in our power not to live entirely as animals.
-When all is said and done, what is clear is that all lives come to an end before their time.
-A tree cries when it is cut down, a dog howls when it is beaten, but a man matures when it is offended.
-As my cat would say, all hours are great for sleeping.
-We never consider that the things that dogs know about us are things that we have not the slightest idea about.
-As often happens, what remains to be done is what tires us the most, and we only calm down when it is done.
-Until death, faced with the option of living or dying, choose to live.
-The history of the human being is the history of our misunderstandings with God, he does not understand us, and we do not understand him.
-If you don't write your books, nobody will do it for you. No one else has lived your life.
-This is how life should be, when someone loses their heart, the other must have enough heart and courage for both of them.
-The only thing more terrifying than blindness is being the only one who can see.
-That's life, what he gives you with one hand one day, he takes away with the other.
-The best way to kill a rose is to force it open when it is still just the promise of a bud.
-There are those moments in life, when while the sky opens, it is necessary for a door to close.
-No human can achieve all his wishes in this life except in dreams, so good night everyone.
- Doesn't anyone understand that killing in the name of God only makes you a murderer?
-Like everything else in this life, let time take its course and find solutions.
-A stomach used to starving is satisfied with very little.
-The writers make national literature, while the translators make universal literature.
-Men are angels without wings, nothing could be better than being born without them and making them grow.
-It is possible not to see a lie even if it is in front of us.
-The blind do not need a name, I am my voice, nothing else matters.
-Dignity has no value… When someone begins to make small concessions, in the end life loses all meaning.
-Doubt is the privilege of those who have lived for a long time.
-Each part in itself constitutes the whole to which it belongs.
-Human nature is, by definition, talkative, reckless, indiscreet, gossipy, and incapable of shutting its mouth and keeping it shut.
-A woman is essentially a container made to be filled.
-The ear has to be educated if we want to appreciate musical sounds, just as the eyes have to learn to distinguish the value of words.
-In a kingdom, modesty can be a sign of weakness.
-Today's bread does not take away yesterday's hunger, much less tomorrow's.
-The only time we can talk about death is while we are alive, not after.
-There is nothing healthier for a man than to walk on his own two legs.
-Creating is always much more stimulating than destroying.
-Everything in life is a uniform; the only time our bodies are really in plain clothes is when we are naked.
-In this world everything can offer a voluntary answer, but what takes time is asking the questions.
-We all have our moments of weakness, and if we manage not to have them today, we will surely have them tomorrow.
-All stories are like those that deal with the creation of the universe, no one was there, no one witnessed anything, but still everyone knows what happened.
-Speaking strictly, we do not make decisions, the decisions are what they make us.
-You don't know, if you don't step outside yourself, you will never discover who you are.
-Anyone who gets up early on initiative or because he is forced to do so out of necessity, finds it intolerable to those who can continue sleeping.
-Our God, creator of heaven and earth, is completely mad.
-In all stages there are always new wonders that surprise the human being until he gets used to it and loses interest.
-The door is the outstretched hand of the house.
-Don't lose yourself.
-When is it necessary to kill? When something that is alive is already dead.
-With the passage of time, like social evolution and genetic exchange, we end up putting our consciousness in the color of our blood and the salt of our tears.
-That we are going to die is something we know from the moment we are born, that is why, in some way, it is as if we were born to die.
-When I am busy with work that requires continuity, like a novel, I write every day.
- Look what happened in France with the employment law. The law was withdrawn because the people demonstrated in the streets. I think what we need is a global movement of people who don't give up.
-The most important period in my literary career came at the beginning of the Revolution, and, in a way, it took place thanks to the Revolution.
-Abstention means that you stayed at home or that you went to the beach. By voting blank you are saying that you have a political conscience, but that you do not agree with any of the political options available.
- I suppose that nobody will deny the positive aspects of the North American culture. These are well known. But these aspects do not make us forget the catastrophic effects of the industrial and commercial colonization process that the United States is perpetrating on the rest of the planet.
-People live under the illusion that we have a democratic system, but that is only the external form of this system. We actually live in a plutocracy, the ruling system of the rich.
-I have never liked the "positive heroes" of literature. They are almost always clichés, copies of copies, until the pattern has been trite. I prefer confusion, doubt, insecurity; not simply because it is raw and productive material, literarily speaking, but because it is how we humans really are.
- Writing, for me, is a job. I do not separate work from the act of writing, as if they were different things. I dedicate myself to putting words one after another or before another, to tell a story, to say something that I think is important or useful, or, at least, important or useful for me.
-After all, I'm quite normal. I don't have weird habits, I don't dramatize. Above all, I don't make writing romantic. I am not talking about the anguish suffered when creating. I'm not afraid of a blank page, writer's block, or those things you hear from writers.
-During my adolescence, my political training was nourished by Marxist ideology. It was natural, since my ideology was influenced by the atmosphere of critical and active resistance. This was the case throughout the dictatorship and until the 1974 Revolution.
-Americans have discovered the fragility of life, that abominable fragility that the rest of the world has already suffered or is suffering right now with terrible intensity.
-I didn't have books at home. I began to frequent a public library in Lisbon, where, without any help except curiosity and eagerness to learn, my taste for reading began to develop and refine.