Quotes from The Cave

“...in matters of feeling and of the heart, too much is always better than too little.”
― José Saramago, quote from The Cave

“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 ...”
― José Saramago, quote from The Cave

“What does reading do, You can learn almost everything from reading, But I read too, So you must know something, Now I'm not so sure, You'll have to read differently then, How, The same method doesn't work for everyone, each person has to invent his or her own, whichever suits them best, 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, Unless, Unless what, Unless those rivers don't have just two shores but many, unless each reader is his or her own shore, and that shore is the only shore worth reaching.”
― José Saramago, quote from The Cave

“... that's how life should be, when one person loses heart, the other must have heart and courage enough for both.”
― José Saramago, quote from The Cave

“إنها المشكلة الدائمة نفسها، إذا لم نتكلم نكون تعساء، وإذا تكلمنا نختلف.”
― José Saramago, quote from The Cave

“... the best way of killing a rose is to force it open when it is still only the promise of a bud.”
― José Saramago, quote from The Cave

“There are such moments in life, when, in order for heaven to open, it is necessary for a door to close.”
― José Saramago, quote from The Cave

“هكذا هي الحياة، إنها مليئة بكلمات لا تستحق النطق بها، أو أنها استحقت ذلك في وقت ما، ولم تعد تستحقه، فكل كلمة نقولها تنتزع مكان كلمة أخرى أكثر جدارة منها.”
― José Saramago, quote from The Cave

“We say to the confused, Know thyself, as if knowing yourself was not the fifth and most difficult of human arithmetical operations, we say to the apathetic, Where there's a will, there's a way, as if the brute realities of the world did not amuse themselves each day by turning that phrase on its head, we say to the indecisive, Begin at the beginning, as if beginning were the clearly visible point of a loosely wound thread and all we had to do was to keep pulling until we reached the other end, and as if, between the former and the latter, we had held in our hands a smooth, continuous thread with no knots to untie, no snarls to untangle, a complete impossibility in the life of a skein, or indeed, if we may be permitted one more stock phrase, in the skein of life.”
― José Saramago, quote from The Cave

“الطبيعة البشرية ثرثارة في التعريف ، متهورة وغير رصينة ، مهذارة وعاجزة عن إغلاق فمها وإبقائه مطبقا.”
― José Saramago, quote from The Cave

“we would understand much more about life’s complexities if we applied ourselves to an assiduous study of its contradictions, instead of wasting time
on identities and coherences, seeing as these have a duty to provide their own explanations.”
― José Saramago, quote from The Cave

“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.”
― José Saramago, quote from The Cave

“الانتظار يؤدي إلى ما هو أكثر من إبطال المفاجآت، إنه يخدّر الانفعالات، فكل ما نتمناه أو نخشاه نكون قد عشناه خلال تمنينا له أو خشيتنا منه.”
― José Saramago, quote from The Cave

“يُمكن لنا أن نعتاد. إننا نسمع في أحيان كثيرة، أو أننا نقوله نحن بالذات، يُمكن للمرء أن يعتاد، يقولون، نقول، بهدوء يبدو حقيقيًا، لأنه لا وجود له في الحقيقة، ولم يُكتشف بعد أسلوب آخر للتعبير عن استسلامنا بقدر ممكن من الكرامة، وما لا يسأل عنه أحد: ما هي الكلفة حتى يعتاد أحدنا.”
― José Saramago, quote from The Cave

“A person is not like a thing that you put down in one place and leave, a person moves, thinks, asks, questions, doubts, investigates, probes, and while it is true that, out of a long habit of resignation, he sooner or later ends up looking as if he has submitted to the objects, don't go thinking that this apparent submission is necessarily permanent.”
― José Saramago, quote from The Cave

“إنني أؤمن بأنه توجد فرص في الحياة يتوجب علينا فيها الانقياد لتيار ما يحدث،كما لو أننا نفتقر إلى القوة اللازمة للمقاومة،ولكننا نكتشف فجأة أن النهر قد تحول لمصلحتنا،ولا ينتبه لذلك أحد سوانا،وقد يظن من ينظر إلينا أننا مشرفون على الغرق،في حين أن مركبنا يكون أكثر ثباتا من أي وقت آخر.”
― José Saramago, quote from The Cave

“...we confidently say that it's not worth trying to reach any conclusions merely because we decide to stop halfway along the path that would lead us straight to them.”
― José Saramago, quote from The Cave

“الغريزية تتعايش جنبًا إلى جنب مع الذكاء، ولكنها أسرع منه بصورة غير متناهية، ولهذا يجد الذكاء المسكين نفسه مضحكًا في أحيان كثيرة، وأنه مزردى في مناسبات كثيرة.”
― José Saramago, quote from The Cave

“السفينة المتوقفة لا تسافر ، فمهما يكن ما سيحدث في الغد لابد من العمل اليوم ، ومن يزرع شجرة لا يعرف أيضا إذا ما كان سينتهي مشنوقا عليها .”
― José Saramago, quote from The Cave

“Human vocabulary is still not capable, and probably never will be, of knowing, recognizing, and communicating everything that can be humanly experienced and felt. Some say that the main cause of this very serious difficulty lies in the fact that human beings are basically made of clay, which, as the encyclopedias helpfully explain, is a detrital sedimentary rock made up of tiny mineral fragments measuring one two hundred and fifty-sixths of a millimeter. Until now, despite long linguistic study, no one has managed to come up with a name for this.”
― José Saramago, quote from The Cave

“Ni la juventud sabe lo que puede, ni la vejez puede lo que sabe.”
― José Saramago, quote from The Cave

“إنه خطر المظاهر،وعندما تخدعنا تكون الخدعة على الدوام نحو الأسوأ.”
― José Saramago, quote from The Cave

“فالرجال،ويجب علينا أن نعترف بذلك دفعة وحدة،لن يتوصلوا أبدا إلى فهم النساء.”
― José Saramago, quote from The Cave

“There is nothing as sad, nothing as unutterably sad, as an old man crying.”
― José Saramago, quote from The Cave

“... time is a master of ceremonies who always ends up putting us in our rightful place, we advance, stop, and retreat according to his orders, our mistake lies in imagining that we can catch him out.”
― José Saramago, quote from The Cave

“... we are only ever pretending to ourselves, never to other people ...”
― José Saramago, quote from The Cave

“إنها حقيقة جيدة ، فالشباب لا يعرف ما يمكنه تحقيقه ، والشيخوخة لا تتمكن من تحقيق ما تعرفه .”
― José Saramago, quote from The Cave

“ومع ذلك ، ومثلما يحدث في الحياة ، عندما نظن أنهم قد انتزعوا منا كل شئ ، ثم نكتشف فجأة أنه قد بقي لدينا شئ ما ، تظهر هنا أيضا أشياء مبعثرة ، ....”
― José Saramago, quote from The Cave

“فما هو معروف أنه سيحدث يكون بطريقة ما كما لو أنه قد حدث،فالانتظار يؤدي إلى ما هو أكثر من إبطال المفاجآت،إنه يخدر الانفعالات،فكل مانتمناه أو نخشاه نكون قد عشناه خلال تمنيتنا له أو خشيتنا منه.”
― José Saramago, quote from The Cave

“‫هكذا هي الحياة ، كثيرا ما تتكون من أشياء تنتهي ، وتتكون من أشياء تبدأ أيضا ، لكنها ليست الأشياء نفسها على الإطلاق .”
― José Saramago, quote from The Cave

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Popular quotes

“METAPHOR: A tightly fitting suit of metal, generally tin, which entirely encloses the wearer, both impeding free movement and preventing emotional expression and/or social contact.”
― Chris Ware, quote from Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth

“It is a well-known established fact throughout the many-dimensional worlds of the multiverse that most really great discoveries are owed to one brief moment of inspiration. There's a lot of spadework first, of course, but what clinches the whole thing is the sight of, say, a falling apple or a boiling kettle or the water slipping over the edge of the bath. Something goes click inside the observer's head and then everything falls into place. The shape of DNA, it is popularly said, owes its discovery to the chance sight of a spiral staircase when the scientist=s mind was just at the right receptive temperature. Had he used the elevator, the whole science of genetics might have been a good deal different.

This is thought of as somehow wonderful. It isn't. It is tragic. Little particles of inspiration sleet through the universe all the time traveling through the densest matter in the same way that a neutrino passes through a candyfloss haystack, and most of them miss.

Even worse, most of the ones that hit the exact cerebral target, hit the wrong one.

For example, the weird dream about a lead doughnut on a mile-high gantry, which in the right mind would have been the catalyst for the invention of repressed-gravitational electricity generation (a cheap and inexhaustible and totally non-polluting form of power which the world in question had been seeking for centuries, and for the lack of which it was plunged into a terrible and pointless war) was in fact had by a small and bewildered duck.

By another stroke of bad luck, the sight of a herd of wild horses galloping through a field of wild hyacinths would have led a struggling composer to write the famous Flying God Suite, bringing succor and balm to the souls of millions, had he not been at home in bed with shingles. The inspiration thereby fell to a nearby frog, who was not in much of a position to make a startling contributing to the field of tone poetry.

Many civilizations have recognized this shocking waste and tried various methods to prevent it, most of them involving enjoyable but illegal attempts to tune the mind into the right wavelength by the use of exotic herbage or yeast products. It never works properly.”
― Terry Pratchett, quote from Sourcery

“We may insist as often as we like that man's intellect is powerless in comparison to his instinctual life, and we may be right in this. Nevertheless, there is something peculiar about this weakness. The voice of the intellect is a soft one, but it will not rest until it has gained a hearing. Finally, after a countless succession of rebuffs, it succeeds.”
― Sigmund Freud, quote from The Future of an Illusion

“He doesn't teach you what to think, he teaches you how to think”
― Lurlene McDaniel, quote from Don't Die, My Love

“[BURR]
I am the one thing in life I can control.”
― Lin-Manuel Miranda, quote from Hamilton: The Revolution

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About BookQuoters

BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.