Jorge Luis Borges Quotes & Sayings

Years later, Taylor was inspecting the jails of the kingdom; and in the one at Nittur the ceiling had been covered, in barbaric colours, which time was subtilizing before erasing them, by a Muslim fakir's elaboration of a kind of infinite Tiger. This Tiger was composed of many tigers in the most vertiginous fashion : it was traversed by tigers, scored by tigers and it contained seas and Himalayas and armies which seemed to reveal still other tigers. The painter had died many years ago in this very cell; he had come from Sind, or maybe Guzerat, and his original purpose had been to design a map of the world. Indeed, some traces of this were yet to be discerned in the monstrous image ... — Jorge Luis Borges

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

I had no wish to take any determined route on that stroll; I attempted, rather, a maximum latitude of probabilities in order not to wear out expectation with an obligatory anticipation of a single one of them. I was able, within the imperfect limits of possibility, to walk, as they say, at random. I accepted, without any conscious prejudice but that of avoiding the wider avenues and streets, the most obscure invitations of chance. — Jorge Luis Borges

To say good-bye is to deny separation; it is to say Today we play at going our own ways, but we'll see each other tomorrow. Men invented farewells because they somehow knew themselves to be immortal, even while seeing themselves as contingent and ephemeral. — Jorge Luis Borges

In my next life I will try to commit more errors. — Jorge Luis Borges

I have committed the worst of sins one can commit ... I have not been happy. — Jorge Luis Borges

I thought of a labyrinth of labyrinths, of one sinuous spreading labyrinth that would encompass the past and the future ... I felt myself to be, for an unknown period of time, an abstract perceiver of the world. — Jorge Luis Borges

As I think of the many myths, there is one that is very harmful, and that is the myth of countries. I mean, why should I think of myself as being an Argentine, and not a Chilean, and not an Uruguayan.

I don't know really.

All of those myths that we impose on ourselves - and they make for hatred, for war, for enmity - are very harmful.

Well, I suppose in the long run, governments and countries will die out and we'll be just, well, cosmopolitans. — Jorge Luis Borges

Mirrors and copulation are abominable, since they both multiply the numbers of men ... — Jorge Luis Borges

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

Soccer is popular because stupidity is popular. — Jorge Luis Borges

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

It must be that I am not made to be a dead man, but these places and this discussion seem like a dream, and not a dream dreamed by me but by someone else still to be born. — Jorge Luis Borges

It is also said that it takes the shape of a man pointing to both heaven and earth, in order to show that the lower world is the map and mirror of the higher — 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

I wonder if I have woven through dreams the sexual strife. I don't think so. But after all, my business is to weave dreams. I suppose I may be allowed to choose the material. — Jorge Luis Borges

I reread these negative remarks and realize that I do not know whether music can despair of music or marble of marble. I do know that literature is an art that can foresee the time when it will be silenced, an art that can become inflamed with its own virtue, fall in love with its own decline, and court its own demise. — 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

I secretly assumed, as poets do,
The duty on me to define the moon. — Jorge Luis Borges

The central fact of my life has been the existence of words and the possibility of weaving those words into poetry. — Jorge Luis Borges

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

It is clear that there is no classification of the Universe that is not arbitrary and full of conjectures. The reason for this is very simple: we do not know what kind of thing the universe is. — Jorge Luis Borges

Words are symbols for shared memories. If I use a word, then you should have some experience of what the word stands for. If not, the word means nothing to you. — Jorge Luis Borges

Music, states of happiness, mythology, faces belaboured by time, certain twilights and certain places try to tell us something, or have said something we should have missed, or are about to say something; this imminence of a revelation which does not occur is, perhaps, the aesthetic phenomenon. — Jorge Luis Borges

The poverty of yesterday was less squalid than the poverty we purchase with our industry today. Fortunes were smaller then as well. — Jorge Luis Borges

Gradually, the concrete enigma I labored at disturbed me less than the generic enigma of a sentence written by a god. What type of sentence (I asked myself) will an absolute mind construct? I considered that even in the human languages there is no proposition that does not imply the entire universe: to say "the tiger" is to say the tigers that begot it, the deer and turtles devoured by it, the grass on which the deer fed, the earth that was mother to the grass, the heaven that gave birth to the earth. I considered that in the language of a god every word would enunciate that infinite concatenation of facts, and not in an implicit but in an explicit manner, and not progressively but instantaneously. In time, the notion of a divine sentence seemed puerile or blasphemous. A god, I reflected, ought to utter only a single word and in that word absolute fullness. No word uttered by him can be inferior to the universe or less than the sum total of time. — Jorge Luis Borges

This has happened and will happen again,' said Euphorbus. 'You are not lighting a pyre, you are lighting a labyrinth of flames. If all the fires I have seen were gathered together here, they would not fit on earth and the angels would be blinded. I have said this many times.' Then he cried out, because the flames had reached him. — Jorge Luis Borges

Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire. — Jorge Luis Borges

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

I ... have always known that my destiny was, above all, a literary destiny - that bad things and some good things would happen to me, but that, in the long run, all of it would be converted
into words. Particularly the bad things, since happiness does not need to be transformed: happiness is its own end. — Jorge Luis Borges

The Falklands thing was a fight between two bald men over a comb. — Jorge Luis Borges

When I feel I'm going to write something, then I just am quiet and I try to listen. Then something comes through. And I do what I can in order not to tamper with it. — Jorge Luis Borges

The famed author Robert Lewis Stevenson declared that he'd trained his Brownies to be writers. As he slept, they would whisper fantastic plots in his ear
for example, the strange case of Dr. Jekyll and the diabolical Mr. Hyde, and that episode in "Olalla" when a young man from an old Spanish family bites his sister's hand. — Jorge Luis Borges

I cannot lament the loss of a love or a friendship without meditating that one loses only what one really never had. — Jorge Luis Borges

I have known uncertainty: a state unknown to the Greeks. — Jorge Luis Borges

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

Poem Written in a Copy of Beowulf
At various times, I have asked myself what reasons
moved me to study, while my night came down,
without particular hope of satisfaction,
the language of the blunt-tongued Anglo-Saxons.
Used up by the years, my memory
loses its grip on words that I have vainly
repeated and repeated. My life in the same way
weaves and unweaves its weary history.
Then I tell myself: it must be that the soul
has some secret, sufficient way of knowing
that it is immortal, that its vast, encompassing
circle can take in all, can accomplish all.
Beyond my anxiety, beyond this writing,
the universe waits, inexhaustible, inviting. — Jorge Luis Borges

There is no need to build a labyrinth when the entire universe is one. — Jorge Luis Borges

Being an agnostic means all things are possible, even God, even the Holy Trinity. This world is so strange that anything may happen, or may not happen. Being an agnostic makes me live in a larger, a more fantastic kind of world, almost uncanny. It makes me more tolerant. — Jorge Luis Borges

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

I think of reading a book as no less an experience than travelling or falling in love. — 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

At first cautiously, later indifferently, at last desperately, I wandered up the stairs and along the pavement of the inextricable palace. (Afterwards I learned that the width and height of the steps were not constant, a fact which made me understand the singular fatigue they produced). 'This palace is a fabrication of the gods,' I thought at the beginning. I explored the uninhabited interiors and corrected myself: ' The gods who built it have died.' I noted its peculiarities and said: 'The gods who built it were mad.' I said it, I know, with an incomprehensible reprobation which was almost remorse, with more intellectual horror than palpable fear ...
... 'This City' (I thought) 'is so horrible that its mere existence and perdurance, though in the midst of a secret desert, contaminates the past and the future and in some way even jeopardizes the stars. — Jorge Luis Borges

There is a river whose waters give
immortality; somewhere there must be
another river whose waters take it away. The
number of rivers is not infinite; an immortal
traveler wandering the world will someday have
drunk from them all. — Jorge Luis Borges

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

Time is the substance from which I am made. Time is a river which carries me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger that devours me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire. — Jorge Luis Borges

There is a labyrinth which is a straight line. — Jorge Luis Borges

I will pause to consider this eternity from which the subsequent ones derive. — Jorge Luis Borges

I know very little of my own work by heart, because I don't like what I write. In fact, I find myself personally expressed far better in the writings of other poets than in my own, because I know all my mistakes - I know all the chinks and all the padding, I know that a particular line is weak, and so on. I read other poets in a different way; I don't look too closely at them. — Jorge Luis Borges

In the earliest times, which were so susceptible to vague speculation and the inevitable ordering of the universe, there can have existed no division between the poetic and the prosaic. Everything must have been tinged with magic. Thor was not the god of thunder; he was the thunder and the god. — Jorge Luis Borges

I imagined a labyrinth of labyrinths, a maze of mazes, a twisting, turning, ever-widening labyrinth that contained both past and future and somehow implied the stars. Absorbed in those illusory imaginings, I forgot that I was a pursued man; I felt myself, for an indefinite while, the abstract perceiver of the world. The vague, living countryside, the moon, the remains of the day did their work in me; so did the gently downward road, which forestalled all possibility of weariness. The evening was near, yet infinite. — Jorge Luis Borges

To arrange a library is to practice in a quiet and modest way the art of criticism. — Jorge Luis Borges

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

The man who acquires an encyclopedia does not thereby acquire every line, every paragraph, every page, and every illustration; he acquires the possibility of becoming familiar with one and another of those things. — Jorge Luis Borges

When writers die they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarnation.
[As attributed by Alastair Reid in Neruda and Borges, The New Yorker, June 24, 1996; as well as in The Talk of the Town, The New Yorker, July 7, 1986] — Jorge Luis Borges

Reality is partial to symmetry and slight anachronisms — Jorge Luis Borges

The things that are said in literature are always the same. What is important is the way they are said. Looking for metaphors, for example: When I was a young man I was always hunting for new metaphors. Then I found out that really good metaphors are always the same. — Jorge Luis Borges

I do not know whether music knows how to despair over music, or marble over marble, but literature is an art which knows how to prophesize the time in which it might have fallen silent, how to attack its own virtue, and how to fall in love with its own dissolution and court its own end. — Jorge Luis Borges

To be immortal is commonplace; except for man, all creatures are immortal, for they are ignorant of death; what is divine, terrible, incomprehensible, is to know that one is immortal. — Jorge Luis Borges

There is a concept that is the corrupter and destroyer of all others. I speak not of Evil, whose limited empire is that of ethics; I speak of the infinite. — Jorge Luis Borges

,all our lives we postpone everything that can be postponed; perhaps we all have the certainty, deep inside, that we are immortal and sooner or later every man will do everything, know all there is to know. — Jorge Luis Borges

On those remote pages [of 'a certain Chinese encyclopedia'] it is written that animals are divided into (a) those that belong to the Emperor, (b) embalmed ones, (c) those that are trained, (d) suckling pigs, (e) mermaids, (f ) fabulous ones, (g) stray dogs, (h) those that are included in this classification, (i) those that tremble as if they were mad, (j) innumerable ones, (k) those drawn with a very fine camel's hair brush, (l) others, (m) those that have just broken a flower vase, (n) those that resemble flies from a distance. — Jorge Luis Borges

Poetry remembers that it was an oral art before it was a written art. — Jorge Luis Borges

The exercise of letters is sometimes linked to the ambition to contruct an absolute book, a book of books that includes the otherslike a Platonic archetype, an object whose virtues are not diminished by the passage of time. — Jorge Luis Borges

We spend our lives waiting for our book and it never comes. — Jorge Luis Borges

Although I'm very lazy when it comes to writing, I'm not that lazy when it comes to thinking. I like to develop the plan of a short story, then cut it as short as possible, try to evolve all the necessary details. I know far more about the characters than what actually comes out of the writing. — Jorge Luis Borges

The system was elementary, as you can see. Naturally these "lotteries" failed. Their moral virtue was nil. They were not directed at all of man's faculties, but only at hope. — Jorge Luis Borges

If I write a fantastic story, I'm not writing something willful. On the contrary, I am writing something that stands for my feelings, or for my thoughts. So that, in a sense, a fantastic story is as real and perhaps more real than a mere circumstantial story. Because after all, circumstances come and go, and symbols remain. — Jorge Luis Borges

The library will endure; it is the universe. As for us, everything has not been written; we are not turning into phantoms. We walk the corridors, searching the shelves and rearranging them, looking for lines of meaning amid leagues of cacophony and incoherence, reading the history of the past and our future, collecting our thoughts and collecting the thoughts of others, and every so often glimpsing mirrors, in which we may recognize creatures of the information. — Jorge Luis Borges

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

There is no pleasure more complex than that of thought and we surrendered ourselves to it. — Jorge Luis Borges

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

I ask of any God, of any gods, that if they give immortality, I hope to be granted oblivion also. — Jorge Luis Borges

The possibilities of the art of combination are not infinite, but they tend to be frightful. — Jorge Luis Borges

The flattery of posterity is not worth much more than contemporary flattery, which is worth nothing. — Jorge Luis Borges

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

I foresee that man will resign himself each day to new abominations, and soon that only bandits and soldiers will be left. — Jorge Luis Borges

The morning sun was shone over the bronze blade. There were no more traces of blood left. "Would you believe it Ariadne?" said Theseus "The Minotaur almost didn't defended himself. — Jorge Luis Borges

In this night too, in this night of his mortal eyes into which he was now descending, love and danger were again waiting ...
a murmur of glory and hexameters, of men defending a temple the gods will not save, and of black vessels searching the sea for a beloved isle;
the murmor of the Odysseys and Iliads it was his destiny to sing and leave echoing concavely in the memory of man.
These things we know, but not those he felt descending into the last shade of all. — Jorge Luis Borges

Tomorrow, in the fields of my kingdom, may you have a happy battle.
May your kingly hands be terrible in weaving the sword stuff.
May those opposing your sword become meat for the red swan.
May your many gods glut you with glory, may they glut you with blood.
Victorious may you be in the dawn, king who treads on Ireland.
Of your many days may none shine bright as tomorrow.
Because that day will be the last. I swear it to you, King Magnus.
For before its light is blotted, I shall vanquish you and blot you out, Magnus Barfod. — Jorge Luis Borges

The thought came over me that never would one full and absolute moment, containing all the others, justify my life, that all of my instants would be provisional phases, annihilators of the past turned to face the future, and that beyond the episodic, the present, the circumstantial, we were nobody. — Jorge Luis Borges

The years go by, and I've told the story so many times that I'm not sure anymore whether I actually remember it or whether I just remember the words I tell it with. — Jorge Luis Borges

The execution was set for the 29th of March, at nine in the morning. This delay was due to a desire on the part of the authorities to act slowly and impersonally, in the manner of planets or vegetables. — Jorge Luis Borges

If I could live again - I will travel light,
If I could live again - I'll try to work bare feet
at the beginning of spring till
the end of autumn,
I'll ride more carts,
I'll watch more sunrises ... — Jorge Luis Borges

I have no personal system of philosophy. I never attempt to do that. I am merely a man of letters. — 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

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

Tearing money is an impiety, like throwing away bread. — Jorge Luis Borges

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

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

Ferrari: How odd, Borges, it seems that we are talking constantly through memory. Sometimes, our conversations remind me of a dialogue between two memories.
Borges: In fact, that's what it is. If we are something, we are our past, aren't we? Our past is not what can be recorded in a biography or in the newspapers. Our past is our memory. That memory can be hidden or inaccurate - it doesn't matter. It's there, isn't it? It can be a lie but that lie becomes part of our memory, part of us. (Conversations, Vol. 1) — Jorge Luis Borges

Poetry springs from something deeper; it's beyond intelligence. — Jorge Luis Borges

In an isolated region from Iran there is this wall tower, windowless, doorless, not very tall. In its only room with arched walls and the stamped earth as its floor, there's a wooden table and a bench. In this round cell a man that looks like me is writing in signs that i don't understand a long poem about a man who in another round cell is writing a poem about a man in another round cell. Endless series; nobody will ever read what prisoners write. — Jorge Luis Borges

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. — Jorge Luis Borges

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

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

At the beginning of their careers many writers have a need to overwrite. They choose carefully turned-out phrases; they want to impress their readers with their large vocabularies. By the excesses of their language, these young men and women try to hide their sense of inexperience. With maturity the writer becomes more secure in his ideas. He finds his real tone and develops a simple and effective style. — Jorge Luis Borges

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. — Jorge Luis Borges