Life & Wisdom Quote by Jose Saramago

Saramago’s line lands with the calm menace of a construction site at night: the scaffolding is up, the worklights are on, and the building is already cracking. Calling the human “constantly under construction” borrows the language of progress we like to believe in - education, self-improvement, history’s upward slope. Then he flips it with “in a parallel fashion” and “constant destruction,” a phrase that refuses the comforting idea that decay is an exception. The syntax matters: not “and sometimes destroyed,” but an always-running counterprocess, as integral as growth itself.

The intent isn’t motivational; it’s anti-teleological. Saramago, a novelist who spent his career interrogating institutions (church, state, capitalism, even the storybook notion of “humanity”), is poking at the modern promise that we can engineer a stable self. You can be building character and eroding it in the same day: habits formed while nerves fray, empathy gained while illusions die, bodies strengthened while cells age. The quote’s power is its refusal to grant any final version of the person - no completed project, no tidy “authentic self” waiting at the end of therapy or ideology.

Subtextually, it’s also political. “Construction” evokes collective projects; “destruction” hints at what those projects demand as collateral: memory edited, dissent flattened, lives worn down. In Saramago’s worldview, the human is not a monument but a process - and every process includes loss. That isn’t nihilism; it’s an honest accounting of what it costs to become.