Luis Borges Quotes & Sayings

But if a book is tedious to you, don't read it; that book was not written for you. Reading should be a form of happiness, — Jorge Luis Borges

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. — Jorge Luis Borges

Life itself is a quotation. — Jorge Luis Borges

In fact I'm in too much of a mental muddle to know where I am - an idealist or not. I'm a mere man of letters, and I do what I can with those subjects. — Jorge Luis Borges

The exchange of thoughts is a condition necessary for all love, all friendship and all real dialogue. Two men who can speak together can enrich and broaden themselves indefinitely. — Jorge Luis Borges

Chang Tzu tells us of a persevering man who after three laborious years mastered the art of dragon-slaying. For the rest of his days, he had not a single opportunity to test his skills. — Jorge Luis Borges

God made Himself totally a man but a man to the point of infamy, a man to the point of reprobation and the abyss. To save us, He could have chosen *any* of the destinies which make up the complex web of history; He could have been Alexander or Pythagoras or Rurik or Jesus; He chose the vilest destiny of all: He was Judas. — Jorge Luis Borges

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. — Jorge Luis Borges

Then Bioy Casares recalled that one of the heresiarchs of Uqbar had stated that mirrors and copulation are abominable, since they both multiply the numbers of man. — Jorge Luis Borges

People speak generally of a plain style and an elaborate style. I think this is wrong, because what is important ... is that poetry should be living ... — 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

The sea is an idiom I cannot decipher. — Jorge Luis Borges

Oh, Buenos Aires, I have traveled around the world, but I've never been separated from you," said Argentine poet Jorge Luis Borges. And Saint Thomas said, "A friendship that can end has never been a true friendship." In — Alejandro Jodorowsky

There is nothing very remarkable about
being immortal; with the exception of mankind,
all creatures are immortal, for they know
nothing of death. What is divine, terrible, and
incomprehensible is to know oneself immortal. — Jorge Luis Borges

To think is to forget. — Jorge Luis Borges

A: Absorbed in our discussion of immortality, we had let night fall without lighting the lamp, and we couldn't see each other's faces. With an offhandedness or gentleness more convincing than passion would have been, Macedonio Fernandez' voice said once more that the soul is immortal. He assured me that the death of the body is altogether insignificant, and that dying has to be the most unimportant thing that can happen to a man. I was playing with Macedonio's pocketknife, opening and closing it. A nearby accordion was infinitely dispatching La Comparsita, that dismaying trifle that so many people like because it's been misrepresented to them as being old ... I suggested to Macedonio that we kill ourselves, so we might have our discussion without all that racket.
Z: (mockingly) But I suspect that at the last moment you reconsidered.
A: (now deep in mysticism) Quite frankly, I don't remember whether we committed suicide that night or not. — Jorge Luis Borges

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

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

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

Ars Poetica

To gaze at the river made of time and water
And recall that time itself is another river,
To know we cease to be, just like the river,
And that our faces pass away, just like the water.

To feel that waking is another sleep
That dreams it does not sleep and that death,
Which our flesh dreads, is that very death
Of every night, which we call sleep.

To see in the day or in the year a symbol
Of mankind's days and of his years,
To transform the outrage of the years
Into a music, a rumor and a symbol,

To see in death a sleep, and in the sunset
A sad gold, of such is Poetry
Immortal and a pauper. For Poetry
Returns like the dawn and the sunset.

At times in the afternoons a face
Looks at us from the depths of a mirror;
Art must be like that mirror
That reveals to us this face of ours. — Jorge Luis Borges

I would say that Edgar Allan Poe, [Georges] Perec, Thomas Pynchon, and [Jorge Luis] Borges are all boy-writers. These are writers who take ... a kind of demonic joy in writing. — Paul Auster

The minotaur more than justifies the existence of the labyrinth . — Jorge Luis Borges

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

I write for myself, and perhaps for half a dozen friends. And that should be enough. And that might improve the quality of my writing. But if I were writing for thousands of people, then I would write what might please them. And as I know nothing about them, and maybe I'd have a rather low opinion of them, I don't think that would do any good to my work. — Jorge Luis Borges

Let not the rash marble risk
garrulous breaches of oblivion's omnipotence,
in many words recalling
name, renown, events, birthplace.
All those glass jewels are best left in the dark.
Let not the marble say what men do not.
The essentials of the dead man's life
the trembling hope,
the implacable miracle of pain, the wonder of sensual delight
will abide forever.
Blindly the uncertain soul asks to continue
when it is the lives of others that will make that happen,
as you yourself are the mirror and image
of those who did not live as long as you
and others will be (and are) your immortality on earth. — Jorge Luis Borges

Each thing implies the universe. — Jorge Luis Borges

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

Israelites, Christians and Muslims profess immortality, but the veneration they render this world proves they believe only in it, since they destine all other worlds, in infinite number, to be its reward or punishment. — Jorge Luis Borges

The European and the North American consider that a book that has been awarded any kind of prize must be good; the Argentine allows for the possibility that the book might not be bad, despite the prize. — Jorge Luis Borges

The mathematical sciences wield their particular language made of digits and signs, no less subtle than any other. — 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

When you reach my age, you realize you couldn't have done things very much better or much worse than you did them in the first place. — Jorge Luis Borges

He measured the achievements of others by what they had accomplished, asking of them that they measure him by what he envisaged or planned. — 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

If you have feelings about reading, you feel the rhythm of prose or of a poem like music. It awakens something in your soul and then of course you study, read, you grow up and you begin to understand the message and that is the first step towards understanding life. — Maria Kodama

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

My biggest superhero of writing is Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentine fabulist. He's an amazingly perceptive writer, but also willing to make a joke. — John Hodgman

Let heaven exist, though my place be in hell. — Jorge Luis Borges

Useless to tell myself that a dream
and the memory of yesterday are the same thing — BORGES JORGE LUIS

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

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

,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

Truth never penetrates an unwilling mind. — Jorge Luis Borges

Time forks perpetually toward innumerable futures. In one of them I am your enemy. — Jorge Luis Borges

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

A necessary monster. — Jorge Luis Borges

Was it you that killed me, or did I kill you?" Abel answered. "I don't remember anymore; here we are, together, like before."

"Now I know that you have truly forgiven me," Cain said, "because forgetting is forgiving. I, too, will try to forget. — 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

The indecipherable dust, once Shakespeare. — Jorge Luis Borges

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

There [DreamTigers by Jorge Luis Borges] were these little fablesque things, you know, dream tigers, beautiful, beautiful pieces that when you read them had the power of a long piece, but they were prose, and they had the power of poetry, in that the last line wasn't the end, it was a reverberation, like when you tap on a glass made of crystal, and it goes ping. — Sandra Cisneros

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

We have shared out, like thieves, the amazing treasures of days and nights. — Jorge Luis Borges

It only takes two facing mirrors to build a labyrinth. — Jorge Luis Borges

Azevedo Bandeira is an expert in the art of progressive intimidation, in the satanic maneuver of gradually humiliating his interlocutor by combining verities and gibes. — Jorge Luis Borges

Why a should a dream be any less real than this table. Or Macbeth be less real than today's newspaper. — Jorge Luis Borges

A book is more than a verbal structure or series of verbal structures; it is the dialogue it establishes with its reader and the intonation it imposes upon his voice and the changing and durable images it leaves in his memory. A book is not an isolated being: it is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships. — 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 suppose identity depends on memory. And if my memory is blotted out, then I wonder if I exist - I mean, if I am the same person. Of course, I don't have to solve that problem. It's up to God, if any. — Jorge Luis Borges

In a riddle whose answer is chess, what is the only prohibited word? — Jorge Luis Borges

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

A writer's work is the product of laziness. — 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 present is the instant in which the future crumbles into the past. — 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

In our dreams (writes Coleridge) images represent the sensations we think they cause; we do not feel horror because we are threatened by a sphinx; we dream of a sphinx in order to explain the horror we feel. — Jorge Luis Borges

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

Emerson said that a library is a magic chamber in which there are many enchanted spirits. They wake when we call them. When the book lies unopened, it is literally, geometrically, a volume, a thing among things. When we open it, when the book surrenders itself to its reader, the aesthetic event occurs. And even for the same reader the same book changes, for the change; we are the river of Heraclitus, who said that the man of yesterday is not the man of today, who will not be the man of tomorrow. We change incessantly, and each reading of a book, each rereading, each memory of that rereading, reinvents the text. The text too is the changing river of Heraclitus. — Jorge Luis Borges

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

When I wake up, I wake to something worse. It's the astonishment of being myself — 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

As a boy, I used to marvel that the letters in a closed book did not get scrambled and lost overnight. — Jose Luis Borges

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

What a writer wants to do is not what he does. — 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

There is a saying that only the man who has already committed a crime and repented of it is incapable of that crime; to be free of an erroneous opinion, I myself might add, one must at some time have professed it. — 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

I cannot sleep unless I am surrounded by books. — Jorge Luis Borges

It is a fact, indeed, that most of
the great teachers of mankind have been not writers
but speakers. Think of Pythagoras, Christ, Socrates,
the Buddha, and so on. And since I have spoken of
Socrates, I would like to say something about Plato. I
remember Bernard Shaw said that Plato was the dramatist
who invented Socrates — Jorge Luis Borges

I believe books will never disappear. It is impossible for it to happen. Of all man's diverse tools, undoubtedly the most astounding are his books ... If books were to disappear, history would disappear. So would man. — Jorge Luis Borges

Image is sorcery. — Jorge Luis Borges

Blindness has not been for me a total misfortune; it should not be seen in a pathetic way. It should be seen as a way of life: one of the styles of living. — Jorge Luis Borges

Such a pity that he [GK Chesterton] became a Catholic. — 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

There is no exercise of the intellect which is not, in the final analysis, useless. A philosophical doctrine begins as a plausible description of the universe; with the passage of the years it becomes a mere chapter if not a paragraph or a name in the history of philosophy. — Jorge Luis Borges

It is venturesome to think that a coordination of words (philosophies are nothing more than that) can resemble the universe very much. — 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

To see a thing one has to comprehend it. An armchair presupposes the human body, its joints and limbs; a pair of scissors, the act of cutting. What can be said of a lamp or a car? The savage cannot comprehend the missionary's Bible; the passenger does not see the same rigging as the sailors. If we really saw the world, maybe we would understand it. — Jorge Luis Borges

Leaving behind the babble of the plaza, I enter the Library. I feel, almost physically, the gravitation of the books, the enveloping serenity of order, time magically dessicated and preserved. — Jorge Luis Borges

Whoever would undertake some atrocious enterprise should act as if it were already accomplished should impose upon himself a future as irrevocable as the past. — 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

What I'm really concerned about is reaching one person. And that person may be myself for all I know. — 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

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

As to whether a poem has been written by a great poet or not, this is important only to historians of literature. Let us suppose, for the sake of argument, that I have written a beautiful line; let us take this as a working hypothesis. Once I have written it, that line
does me no good, because, as I've already said, that line came to me from the Holy Ghost, from the subliminal self, or perhaps from some other writer. I often find I am merely quoting something I read some time ago, and then that becomes a rediscovering. Perhaps it is better that a poet should be nameless. — Jorge Luis Borges

We forget that we are all dead men conversing with dead men. — Jorge Luis Borges

God has created nights well-populated
with dreams, crowded with mirror images,
so that man may feel that he is nothing more
than vain reflection. That's what frightens us. — Jorge Luis Borges