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.
The only time we can talk about death is while we're alive, not afterwards.
Don't quibble with the king over pears, let him eat the ripe ones and give you the green ones.
Deep down, the problem is not a God that does not exist, but the religion that proclaims Him. I denounce religions, all religions, as harmful to humankind. These are harsh words, but one must say them.
There are times when it is best to be content with what one has, so as not to lose everything.
At this time of life even a day makes a difference, the only saving grace is that sometimes things improve.
To me, the Bible is a book. Important, no doubt, but a book.
None of his colleagues noticed who had arrived, they responded to his greetings as they always did, Good morning, Senhor Josč, they said and they did not know to whom they were speaking.
It is not pornography that is obscene, it is hunger that is obscene.
Encyclopedias are like immutable cycloramas, prodigious projectors whose reels have got stuck and which show, with a kind of maniacal fixity, a landscape which, because it is condemned to be only and for all eternity what it was, will at the same time grow older more decrepit and more unnecessary. The encyclopedia purchased by Cipriano Algor's father is magnificent and as useless as a line of poetry we cannot quite remember.