Jorge Luis Borges quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Jorge Luis Borges

Jorge Luis Borges Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Jorge Luis Borges on Wise Famous Quotes.

The sea is an idiom I cannot decipher.

From my weakness, I drew strength that never left me.

As the end approaches, there are no longer any images from memory - there are only words.

We accept reality so readily - perhaps because we sense that nothing is real.

It means much to have loved, to have been happy, to have laid my hand on the living Garden, even for a day.

Literature is not exhaustible, for the sufficient and simple reason that a single book is not.

We are our memory,
we are that chimerical museum of shifting shapes,
that pile of broken mirrors.

It's a shame that we have to choose between two such second-rate countries as the USSR and the USA.

Art always opts for the individual, the concrete; art is not Platonic.

I, that used to figure Paradise
In the guise of a library

I have no way of knowing whether the events that I am about to narrate are effects or causes.

If you're a writer you're bound to write something fine, at least now and then, off and on.

All writing is dreaming

We forget that we are all dead men conversing with dead men.

The word happiness exists in every language; it is plausible the thing itself exists.

Unlike the novel, a short story may be, for all purposes, essential.

The present is the instant in which the future crumbles into the past.

In all fiction, when a man is faced with alternatives he chooses one at the expense of others.

Death is just infinity closing in.

The indecipherable dust, once Shakespeare.

God moves the player, he in turn the piece.
But what god beyond God begins the round
Of dust and time and sleep and agonies?

It seemed incredible that this day, a day without warnings or omens, might be that of my implacable death.

A system is nothing more than the subordination of all aspects of the universe to any one of such aspects.

I have always come to life after coming to books.

Image is sorcery.

I can give you my loneliness, my darkness, the hunger of my heart, I am trying to bribe you with uncertainty, with danger, with defeat.

Let others pride themselves about how many pages they have written; I'd rather boast about the ones I've read.

I am not sure of anything, I know nothing ... can you imagine that I don't even know the date of my own death?

To bless thine enemy is a good way to satisfy thy vanity.

That one individual should awaken in another memories that belong to still a third is an obvious paradox.

Besides, rereading, not reading, is what counts.

Time is the tiger that devours me, but I am that tiger.

Any life, however long and complicated it may be, actually consists of a single moment - the moment when a man knows forever more who he is.

I think the first reading of a poem is a true one, and after that we delude ourselves into the belief that the sensation, the impression, is repeated.

It only takes two facing mirrors to build a labyrinth.

Sometimes a few birds, a horse, have saved the ruins of an amphitheater.

One concept corrupts and confuses the others. I am not speaking of the Evil whose limited sphere is ethics; I am speaking of the infinite.

What will my redeemer be like? I wonder. Will he be a bull or a man? Will he perhaps be a bull with the face of a man? Or will he be like me?

My books standing there on the shelf do not know that I have written them.

A necessary monster.

Life and death have been lacking in my life.

Like all the men of Babylon, I have been proconsul; like all, I have been a slave. I have known omnipotence, ignominy, imprisonment.

The Falklands thing was a fight between two bald men over a comb.

The time for your labor has been granted.

He was very religious; he believed that he had a secret pact with God which exempted him from doing good in exchange for prayers and piety.

Centuries and centuries of idealism have not failed to influence reality

Everything touches everything.

Life itself is a quotation.

To think, analyze and invent are not anomalous acts, but the normal respiration of the intelligence.

Reading ... is an activity subsequent to writing: more resigned, more civil, more intellectual.

The tango is a direct expression of something that poets have often tried to state in words: the belief that a fight may be a celebration.

If I were asked to name the chief event in my life, I should say my father's library,

No one is a poet from eight to twelve and from two to six. Whoever is a poet is one always, and continually assaulted by poetry.

I owe the discovery of Uqbar to the conjunction of a mirror and an encyclopedia.

Reality may avoid the obligation to be interesting, but ... hypotheses may not.

To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god.

Happy are the beloved and the lovers and those who can live without love.

The mind was dreaming. The world was its dream.

How strange
it is. For perfect things in poetry do not seem strange;
they seem inevitable. And so we hardly thank the
writer for his pains.

What you really value is what you miss, not what you have.

The fact is that each writer creates his own precursors.

My advanced age has taught me the resignation of being Borges.

I know what the Greeks do not know, incertitude.

The fact is that every author creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.

The central problem of novel-writing is causality.

My memory, sir, is like a garbage disposal.

Thus my life is a flight and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to him.

Democracy is an abuse of statistics.

I never reread what I've written. I'm far too afraid to feel ashamed of what I've done.

Like all those possessing a library, Aurelian was aware that he was guilty of not knowing his in its entirety.

I think most people are more important than their opinions.

The image of the Lord has been replaced by a mirror.

Mir Bahadur Ali is, as we have seen, incapable of evading the most vulgar of art's temptations: that of being a genius.

While we are asleep in this world, we are awake in another one

I don't think there's any essential difference, at least for me, between writing poetry and writing prose.

Nothing is built on stone; All is built on sand, but we must build as if the sand were stone.

There are people who barely feel poetry, and they are generally dedicated to teaching it.

All language is a set of symbols whose use among its speakers assumes a share past

I have been Homer; shortly, I shall be No One, like Ulysses; shortly, I shall be all men; I shall be dead.

Loneliness does not worry me; life is difficult enough, putting up with yourself and with your own habits.

Time is the substance of which we are made

I have known uncertainty: a state unknown to the Greeks.

Day and night, their fail and crippled ships defy the tempest.

There is a labyrinth which is a straight line.

God must not engage in theology. The writer must not destroy by human reasonings the faith that art requires of us.

Any life is made up of a single moment, the moment in which a man finds out, once and for all, who he is.

One is allowed to change the past: the present is so stubborn.

Let heaven exist, though my place be in hell.

There is a concept which corrupts and upsets all others.
I refer not to Evil, whose limited realm is that of ethics; I refer to the infinite.

Captivated by its discipline, humanity forgets and goes on forgetting that it is the discipline of chess players, not of angels.

In my soul the afternoon grows wider and I reflect.

I ... confirm the fact - with a certain bittersweet melancholy - that everything in the world brings me back to a quotation or a book.

Novels include padding; I think padding may be an essential part of the novel, for all I know.

That is what always happens: we never know whether we are victors or whether we are defeated.

I had always thought of Paradise / In form and image as a library.

My taste runs to hourglasses, maps, seventeenth-century typefaces, etymologies, the taste of coffee, and the prose of Robert Louis Stevenson.

I owe my first inkling of the problem of infinity to a large biscuit tin that was a source of vertiginous mystery during my childhood.

How can we manage to illuminate the pathos of our lives?

We are like the wizard who weaves a labyrinth and is forced to wander through it till the end of his days

Every novel is an ideal plane inserted into the realm of reality.