All Quotes

“El general que no sabe vencer, debe saber esperar.”

“La libertad es el derecho que todo hombre tiene a ser honrado y a pensar con dignidad.”

“No hay libertad sin orden, ni orden sin libertad.”

“Los verdaderos amigos son aquellos que vienen a compartir nuestra desgracia.”

“El poder se conserva por los mismos medios que se adquiere.”

“La justicia es la reina de las virtudes republicanas.”

“Life on earth is a hand”

“Love is... born with the pleasure of looking at each other, it is fed with the necessity of seeing each other, it is concluded with the impossibility of separation! Amor”

“Oh, what company good poets are! Longfellow”

“A knowledge of different literatures is the best way to free one's self from the tyranny of any of them. On Oscar Wilde”

“To beautify life is to give it an object. On Oscar Wilde”

“A nation is not a complex of wheels, nor a wild horse race, but a stride upward concerted by real men. A Glance at the North American's Soul Today”

“Men are products, expressions, reflections; they live to the extent that they coincide with their epoch, or to the extent that they differ markedly from it. Henry Ward Beecher”

“A grain of poetry suffices to season a century. Dedication of the Statue of Liberty”

“Interview in Idéias , no. 107 (15 October 1988), trans. Margaret Jull Costa .”

“Deus é o silêncio do universo, e o homem o grito que dá um sentido a esse silêncio. God is the silence of the universe, and man is the cry that gives meaning to that silence. Lanzarote Notebooks (1990), quoted in The Notebook , entry for 9 October 2008.”

“A writer is a man like any other: he dreams. And my dream was to be able to say of this book, when I finished: 'This is a book about Alentejo'. Quoted in José Saramago: il bagaglio dello scrittore ‎, page 41, by Giulia Lanciani, published by Bulzoni, 1996 ISBN 8871199332 , 9788871199337 (256 pages).”

“Não é a pornografia que é obscena, é a fome que é obscena It is not pornography that is obscene, it is hunger that is obscene.”

“Interview Programa Jô Soares , 1997.”

“Um dia, sentado à mesa, pensei: E se fôssemos todos cegos? Imediatamente me veio a resposta: Nós somos todos cegos. 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.'”

“On the idea for his next novel ( Blindness ), which came to him while sitting in a restaurant; New York Times interview with Alan Riding (1998), as quoted in Portuguese Literary & Cultural Studies , 6th Edition (Center for Portuguese Studies and Culture, 2001), p. 131.”

“Sometimes I say that writing a novel is the same as constructing a chair: a person must be able to sit in it, to be balanced on it. If I can produce a great chair, even better. But above all I have to make sure that it has four stable feet. Interview with Katherine Vaz, José Saramago , BOMB Magazine , June 2001.”

“Interview with El País (2002); cited in Princípios (Editora Anita Garibaldi, 2002), p. 88; English translation taken from Phillips The World Turned Upside Down (2010), p. 207.”

“Nostalgia aguda, infinita, terrible, de lo que tengo. Sharp nostalgia, infinite And terrible, for what I already possess!”

“Back of my forehead I feel tonight A whole sky full of stars. Under a western moon. Life is indeed lovely! "Western Moon" in Canción (1935).”

“Poetry and Literature”

“Dynamic ecstasy is absolute romanticism , absolute heroism . And here I return to my point. From my point of view, after the catastrophe which we feel and think is universal, a catastrophe resulting from an excess of useless dynamism of useless progress, of useless realism, of useless technology, after this an unattainable democracy is to be reached through the conception and realization of a new romanticism. "Heroic Reason", as translated by H. R. Hays, in Selected Writings of Juan Ramon Jimenez (1957) edited by Eugenio Florit, p. 231.”

“If they give you ruled paper, write the other way. As quoted in the epigraph in Fahrenheit 451 (1953) by Ray Bradbury ; Susie Salmon also uses this quote in The Lovely Bones , and Daniel Quinn published a book in 2007 with the title If They Give You Lined Paper, Write Sideways”

“Si os dan papel pautado, escribid por el otro lado”

“I am not I. I am this one walking beside me whom I do not see, whom at times I manage to visit, and whom at other times I forget; who remains calm and silent while I talk, and forgives, gently, when I hate, who walks where I am not, who will remain standing when I die. "I am not I", from Lorca and Jiménez: Selected Poems , chosen and translated by Robert Bly (Boston: Beacon Press, 1973), p. 77”