Seeing

by José Saramago

the voters, who are the supreme defenders of democracy, and without whom tyranny, any of the many tyrannies that exist in the world, would long ago have overwhelmed the nation that bore us.

Those who argue thus are forgetting that not only does the universe have its own laws, all of them indifferent to the contradictory dreams and desires of humanity, and in the formulation of which we contribute not one iota, apart, that is, from the words by which we clumsily name them, but everything seems to indicate that it uses these laws for aims and objectives that transcend and always will transcend our understanding,

what can’t be cured must be endured,

Hope is like salt, there’s no nourishment in it, but it gives the bread its savor,

human beings are known universally as the only animals capable of lying, and while it is true that they sometimes lie out of fear and sometimes out of self-interest, they also occasionally lie because they realize, just in time, that this is the only means available to them of defending the truth.

we are a small, tremulous flame which threatens at any moment to go out, and we are afraid, above all, we are afraid,

it is true that man proposes, it is god who disposes,

and there have been very few occasions, almost all of them tragic, when both man and god were in agreement and did all the disposing together.

Don’t let the devil hear you, minister, The devil has such good hearing he doesn’t need things to be spoken out loud, Well, god help us then, There’s no point asking him for help either, he was born stone-deaf.

It’s odd how we spend every day of our life saying goodbye, saying and hearing others say see you tomorrow when, inevitably, on one of those days, which will be someone’s last, either the person we said it to will no longer be here, or we who said it will not.

any day during which we’ve been offered a piece of good advice can never be considered to have been wasted.

Since even the very best advice is, at best, only ever half-obeyed, the council leader did not go to bed.

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 skilfully, to justify their cowardice,

demonstrations never achieve anything, if they did, we wouldn’t allow them,

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

Human nature being what we know it to be, there were, inevitably, examples of selfish fancies, feigned distractions, treacherous appeals to an all-too-easy sentimentality, deceptively seductive maneuverings, but there were also cases of admirable selflessness, of the kind that still allow us to believe that if we persevere in these and other such gestures of worthy abnegation, we will, in the end, more than fulfil our small part in the monumental project of creation.

I’m as bad as the worst, but sometimes I’m suddenly very conscious that that isn’t enough, and my soul aches more than I can say,

Languages are conservative, they always carry their archives with them and hate having to be updated.

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

He did all this with great concentration in order to keep his thoughts at bay, in order to let them in only one at a time, having first asked them what they contained, because you can’t be too careful with thoughts, some present themselves to us with a cloying air of false innocence and then, when it’s too late, reveal their true wicked selves.

one must always take great care with what one thinks one knows, because behind it one finds concealed an endless chain of unknowns, the last of which will probably prove insoluble.

how often fears come to sour our life and prove, in the end, to have no foundation, no reason to exist.