Jorge Luis Borges Quotes

I do not know which of us has written this page.

I owe my first inkling of the problem of infinity to a large biscuit tin that was a source of vertig...

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

I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.

The image of the Lord has been replaced by a mirror.

I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I h...

Learning After some time, you learn the subtle difference betweenholding a handand imprisoning a sou...

When writers die they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarna

A book is more than a verbal structure or series of verbal structures; it is the dialogue it establi...

I came to abominate my body, I came to sense that two eyes, two hands, two lungs are as monstrous as...

When a writer dies, he becomes his books.

I cannot sleep unless I am surrounded by books.

Art is fire plus algebra.

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

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

Democracy is an abuse of statistics.

The story of two dreams is a coincidence, a line drawn by chance, like the shapes of lions or horses...

Being with you and not being with you is the only way I have to measure time.

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

I've fixed my feelings into durable wordswhen they could have been spent on tenderness

A writer always begins by being too complicated—he’s playing at several games at once.

If you sell, say, two thousand copies, it is the same thing as if you had sold nothing at all becaus...

You have wakened not out of sleep, but into a prior dream, and that dream lies within another, and s...

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

Ferrari: How odd, Borges, it seems that we are talking constantly through memory. Sometimes, our con...

As to whether a poem has been written by a great poet or not, this is important only to historians o...

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

When writers die they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarnation.", The New Yorke...

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

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

The fact is that all writers create their precursors. Their work modifies our conception of the past...

There is an hour of the afternoon when the plain is on the verge of saying something. It never says,...

Poets, like the blind, can see in the dark.

I believe the secret of the success of psychoanalysis resides in people's vanity.

Heaven and hell seem out of proportion to me: the actions of men do not deserve so much.

I do not know whether music knows how to despair over music, or marble over marble, but literature i...

Little did they suspect that the years would end by wearing away the disharmony.Little did they susp...

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

We spend our lives waiting for our book and it never comes.

Many of the characters are fools and they're always playing tricks on meand treating me badly.

Time is the substance from which I am made. Time is a river which carries me along, but I am the riv...

Reality is not always probable, or likely.

To be immortal is commonplace; except for man, all creatures are immortal, for they are ignorant of ...

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

The three of them knew it. She was Kafka’s mistress. Kafka had dreamt her. The three of them knew it...

Of all man’s instruments, the most wondrous, no doubt, is the book. The other instruments are extens...

Useless to tell myself that a dreamand the memory of yesterday are the same thing

One of the schools in Tlön has reached the point of denying time. It reasons that the present is und...

Paradise will be a kind of library

Which one of us has never felt, walking through the twilight or writing down a date from his past, t...

Poetry remembers that it was an oral art before it was a written art.

A circle drawn on a blackboard, a right triangle, a rhombus--all these are forms we can fully intuit...

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

. . . In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Provi...

From the twilight of day till the twilight of evening, a leopard, in the last years of the thirteent...

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

I believe that in time we will have reached the point where we will deserve to be free of government...

All our lives we postpone everything that can be postponed; perhaps we all have the certainty, deep ...

So my life is a point-counterpoint, a kind of fugue, and a falling away–and everything winds up bein...

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

Things, events, that occupy space yet come to an end when someone dies make us stop in wonder - and ...

It also occurred to him that throughout history, humankind has told two stories: the story of a lost...

At the railroad station he noted that he still had thirty minutes. He quickly recalled that in a caf...

Time forks perpetually toward innumerable futures. In one of them I am your enemy.

To think is to ignore the differences, to generalize, to abstract.

There is a concept which corrupts and upsets all others.I refer not to Evil, whose limited realm is ...

He thought that the rose was to be found in its own eternity and not in his words; and that we may m...

Leaving behind the babble of the plaza, I enter the Library. I feel, almost physically, the gravitat...

All things left her, allBut one. Her highborn courtlinessAccompanied her to the end,Beyond the raptu...

And so, as I sleep, some dream beguiles me, and suddenly I know I dream.Then I think: this is a drea...

There is a line in Verlaine I shall not recall again,There is a street close by forbidden to my feet...

It must be that I am not made to be a dead man, but these places and this discussion seem like a dre...

In my soul the afternoon grows wider and I reflect.

God, in the dream, illumined the animal's brutishness and he understood the reasons, and accepted hi...

Man's memory shapesIts own Eden within

Whatever one man does, it is as if all men did it. For that reason, it is not unfair that one disobe...

The Library is a sphere whose exact centre is any one of its hexagons and whose circumference is ina...

It was under English trees that I meditated on that lost labyrinth: I pictured it perfect and inviol...

My father and he had cemented (the verb is excessive) one of those English friendships which begin b...

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

Blind to all fault, destiny can be ruthless at one's slightest distraction.

There are objects made up of two sense elements, one visual, the other auditory—the colour of a sunr...

Patriotism, that least discerning of pas

I imagined a labyrinth of labyrinths, a maze of mazes, a twisting, turning, ever-widening labyrinth ...

Another school declares that all time has already transpired and that our life is only the crepuscul...

Puis il réfléchit: la réalité ne coïncide habituellement pas avec les prévisions; avec une logique p...

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

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

And yet, and yet… Denying temporal succession, denying the self, denying the astronomical universe, ...

All men who repeat a line from Shakespeare are William Shakespeare

I cannot lament the loss of a love or a friendship without meditating that one loses only what one r...

Historical truth, for him, is not what has happened; it is what we judge to have happened.

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

One of the schools of Tlön goes so far as to negate time; it reasons that the present is indefinite,...

I suspected once that any human life, however intricate and full it might be, consisted in reality o...

I'm alone and nobody is in the mirror

... in art nothing is more secondary than the author's intentions.

I reread these negative remarks and realize that I do not know whether music can despair of music or...

He [Omar Khayyam] is an atheist, but knows how to interpret in orthodox style the most difficult pas...

The thought came over me that never would one full and absolute moment, containing all the others, j...

We must not be too prodigal with our angels; they are the last divinities we harbor, and they might ...