Jorge Luis Borges Quotes: top 100 famous quotes about Jorge Luis Borges

Jorge Luis Borges Quotes & Sayings

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A ... poet is a discoverer rather than an inventor. — Jorge Luis Borges

With relief, with humiliation, with terror, he understood that he too was a mere appearance, dreamt by another. — Jorge Luis Borges

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

Canada is so far away it hardly exists. — Jorge Luis Borges

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

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

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

All writing is dreaming — Jorge Luis Borges

The Library is a sphere whose exact centre is any one of its hexagons and whose circumference is inaccessible. — Jorge Luis Borges

I came to abominate my body, I came to sense that two eyes, two hands, two lungs are as monstrous as two faces. — Jorge Luis Borges

I no longer believe in literary schools now; I believe in the individual. — Jorge Luis Borges

Paradise will be a kind of library — Jorge Luis Borges

If a writer disbelieves what he is writing, then he can hardly expect his readers to believe it. — Jorge Luis Borges

Words, displaced and mutilated words, words of others, were the poor pittance left him by the hours and the centuries. — Jorge Luis Borges

What you really value is what you miss, not what you have. — Jorge Luis Borges

The fact is that each writer creates his own precursors. — Jorge Luis Borges

Unappreciated because too many of his [Rudyard Kipling's] peers were socialists. — Jorge Luis Borges

The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite, perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries. — Jorge Luis Borges

Centuries of centuries and only in the present do things happen. - JORGE LUIS BORGES — Elizabeth Kolbert

No one can read two thousand books. In the four hundred years I have lived, I've not read more than half a dozen — Jorge Luis Borges

To refute him is to become contaminated with unreality. — Jorge Luis Borges

Democracy is an abuse of statistics. — Jorge Luis Borges

I think that the reader should enrich what he is reading. He should misunderstand the text; he should change it into something else. — Jorge Luis Borges

There is no greater comfort than the idea that we have chosen our own misfortunes. — Jorge Luis Borges

I gazed at every mirror on the planet, not one gave back my reflection. — Jorge Luis Borges

It seemed incredible to me that day without premonitions or symbols should be the one of my inexorable death . — Jorge Luis Borges

When a writer dies, he becomes his books. — Jorge Luis Borges

Translations are a partial and precious documentation of the changes the text suffers. — Jorge Luis Borges

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

I know what the Greeks do not know, incertitude. — Jorge Luis Borges

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

One literature differs from another, either before or after it, not so much because of the text as for the manner in which it is read. — Jorge Luis Borges

.....a miracle has the right to impose conditions. — Jorge Luis Borges

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

I live in a grey world, rather like the silver screen world. But yellow stands out. — Jorge Luis Borges

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

That is what always happens: we never know whether we are victors or whether we are defeated. — Jorge Luis Borges

Many of the characters are fools and they're always playing tricks on me
and treating me badly. — Jorge Luis Borges

I had always thought of Paradise / In form and image as a library. — Jorge Luis Borges

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

We must not be too prodigal with our angels; they are the last divinities we harbor, and they might fly away. — Jorge Luis Borges

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. — Jorge Luis Borges

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. — Jorge Luis Borges

How can we manage to illuminate the pathos of our lives? — Jorge Luis Borges

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

His life, measured in space and time, will take up a mere few lines, which my ignorance will abbreviate further. — Jorge Luis Borges

You may win your heart's desire, but in the end you're cheated of it by death. — Jorge Luis Borges

Man's memory shapes
Its own Eden within — Jorge Luis Borges

Retold, my dream is nothing; dreamt, it was terrible. — Jorge Luis Borges

Every novel is an ideal plane inserted into the realm of reality. — Jorge Luis Borges

We are as ignorant of the meaning of the dragon as we are of the meaning of the universe. — Jorge Luis Borges

Happy are the beloved and the lovers and those who can live without love. — Jorge Luis Borges

The mind was dreaming. The world was its dream. — Jorge Luis Borges

It may be that universal history is the history of the different intonations given a handful of metaphors. — Jorge Luis Borges

I saw all the mirrors on earth and none of them reflected me. — Jorge Luis Borges

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

I think most people are more important than their opinions. — Jorge Luis Borges

The story of two dreams is a coincidence, a line drawn by chance, like the shapes of lions or horses that are sometimes formed by clouds. — Jorge Luis Borges

The certainty that everything has already been written annuls us, or renders us phantasmal. — Jorge Luis Borges

The image of the Lord has been replaced by a mirror. — Jorge Luis Borges

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

It's enough that if I am rich in anything, it is in perplexities rather then in certaintes. — Jorge Luis Borges

While we are asleep in this world, we are awake in another one — Jorge Luis Borges

Misery requires paradises lost — Jorge Luis Borges

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

Solitude weighs me down. Company does too. — Jorge Luis Borges

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

Time broadens the scope of verses and I know of some which, like music, are everything for all men. — Jorge Luis Borges

I have sometimes suspected that the only thing that holds no mystery is happiness, because it is its own justification. — Jorge Luis Borges

I saw a sunset in Queretaro that seemed to reflect the colour of a rose in Bengal. — Jorge Luis Borges

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

The future is inevitable and precise, but it may not occur. God lurks in the gaps. — Jorge Luis Borges

Each thing implies the universe. — Jorge Luis Borges

All theories are legitimate, no matter. What matters is what you do with them. — Jorge Luis Borges

All language is a set of symbols whose use among its speakers assumes a share past — Jorge Luis Borges

Day and night, their fail and crippled ships defy the tempest. — Jorge Luis Borges

Time is living me. — Jorge Luis Borges

The art of writing is mysterious, the opinions we hold are ephemeral ... — Jorge Luis Borges

To die for a religion is easier than to live it absolutely. — Jorge Luis Borges

Imprecision is tolerable and verisimilar in literature, because we always tend towards it in life. — Jorge Luis Borges

I prayed aloud, less to plead for divine favor than to intimidate the tribe with articulate speech. — Jorge Luis Borges

Dictatorships foster oppression, dictatorships foster servitude, dictatorships foster cruelty; more abominable is the fact that they foster idiocy. — Jorge Luis Borges

Jorge Luis Borges: "I have always imagined that paradise will be a kind of library." "The — Suzanne Kelman

Reality is not always probable, or likely. — Jorge Luis Borges

A writer should have another lifetime to see if he's appreciated. — Jorge Luis Borges

A writer always begins by being too complicated - he's playing at several games at once. — Jorge Luis Borges

The central problem of novel-writing is causality. — Jorge Luis Borges

There is a Talmudic legend about three men who go in search of God. One became insane, the other died, and the third met himself. — Jorge Luis Borges

When you come right down to it, opinions are the most superficial things about anyone — Jorge Luis Borges

My father gave me free run of his library. When I think of my boyhood, I think in terms of the books I read. — Jorge Luis Borges

In the critics' vocabulary, the work 'precursor' is indispensable, but it should be cleansed of all connotations of polemics or rivalry. — Jorge Luis Borges

My memory, sir, is like a garbage disposal. — Jorge Luis Borges

I leave to various future times, but not to all, my garden of forking paths. — Jorge Luis Borges

I don't think esthetic schools are important. What is important is the use that is made of them, or whatever the individual writer does. — Jorge Luis Borges

I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library. — Jorge Luis Borges

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

To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god. — Jorge Luis Borges

When a person reaches a certain age, there are many things he or she can feign: happiness is not one of them
-- Jorge Luis Borges — Paul Illidge

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

Censorship is the mother of metaphor. — Jorge Luis Borges