Jorge Luis Borges Quotes & Sayings

#1. Poetry springs from something deeper; it's beyond intelligence.

#2. 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

#3. Many people have thought of me as a thinker, as a philosopher, or even as a mystic. Well the truth is that though I have found reality perplexing enough - in fact, I find it gets more perplexing all the time - I never think of myself as a thinker.

Jorge Luis Borges

#4. No one is anyone, one single immortal man is all men. Like Cornelius Agrippa, I am god, I am hero, I am philosopher, I am demon and I am world, which is a tedious way of saying that I do not exist.

Jorge Luis Borges

#5. If we think of the novel and the epic ... The difference lies in the fact that the important thing about the epic is a hero
a man who is a pattern for all men. While, as Mencken pointed out, the essence of most novels lies in the breaking down of a man, in the degeneration of character.

Jorge Luis Borges

#6. We are ignorant of the meaning of the dragon in the same way that we are ignorant of the meaning of the universe; but there is something in the dragon's image that fits man's imagination, and this accounts for the dragon's appearance in different places and periods.

Jorge Luis Borges

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

Jorge Luis Borges

#8. A ... poet is a discoverer rather than an inventor.

Jorge Luis Borges

#9. I cannot sleep unless I am surrounded by books.

Jorge Luis Borges

#10. In death we shall rediscover all the instants of our life and we shall freely combine them as in dreams.

Jorge Luis Borges

#11. I am attracted to fantastic writing, and fantastic reading, of course. But I think things that we call fantastic may be real, in the sense of being real symbols.

Jorge Luis Borges

#12. 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?

Jorge Luis Borges

#13. Differing from Newton and Schopenhauer, your ancestor did not think of time as absolute and uniform. He believed it an infinite series of times, in a dizzily growing, ever spreading network of diverging, converging and parallel times.

Jorge Luis Borges

#14. 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

#15. You can't measure time by days, the way you measure money by dollars and cents, because dollars are all the same while every day is different and maybe every hour as well.

Jorge Luis Borges

#16. 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

#17. 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

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

Jorge Luis Borges

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

Jorge Luis Borges

#20. 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

#21. 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

#22. I thought that a man might be an enemy of other men, of the differing moments of other men, but never an enemy of a country: not of fireflies, words, gardens, streams, or the West wind.

Jorge Luis Borges

#23. 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

#24. I would say, however, that romantic sentiment is a keen and pathetic sense of time, a few hours of amorous delight, the idea that everything passes away; a deeper sentiment for autumn, for twilight, for the passing nature of our own lives.

Jorge Luis Borges

#25. 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

#26. Words, displaced and mutilated words, words of others, were the poor pittance left him by the hours and the centuries.

Jorge Luis Borges

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

Jorge Luis Borges

#28. I came to the idea of how fine it would be to think of an encyclopedia of an actual world, and then of an encyclopedia, a very rigorous one of course, of an imaginary world, where everything should be linked.

Jorge Luis Borges

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

Jorge Luis Borges

#30. What will die with me when I die, what pathetic or fragile form will the world lose?

Jorge Luis Borges

#31. The steps a man takes from the day of his birth until that of his death trace in time an inconcievable figure. The Divine Mind intuitively grasps that form immediately, as men do a triangle.

Jorge Luis Borges

#32. Life and death have been lacking in my life.

Jorge Luis Borges

#33. 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

#34. My father and he had cemented (the verb is excessive) one of those English friendships which begin by avoiding intimacies and eventually eliminate speech altogether. They used to exchange books and periodicals; they would beat one another at chess, without saying a word.

Jorge Luis Borges

#35. When one confesses to an act, one ceases to be an actor in it and becomes its witness, becomes a man that observes and narrates it and no longer the man that performed it.

Jorge Luis Borges

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

Jorge Luis Borges

#37. 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

#38. In vain have oceans been squandered on you, in vain
the sun, wonderfully seen through Whitman's eyes.
You have used up the years and they have used up you,
and still, and still, you have not written the poem.

Jorge Luis Borges

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

Jorge Luis Borges

#40. There is no need to build a labyrinth when the entire universe is one.

Jorge Luis Borges

#41. On the floor, and hanging on to the bar, squatted an old man, immobile as an object. His years had reduced and polished him as water does a stone or the generations of men do a sentence.

Jorge Luis Borges

#42. To speak is to fall into tautology.

Jorge Luis Borges

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

Jorge Luis Borges

#44. All things left her, all
But one. Her highborn courtliness
Accompanied her to the end,
Beyond the rapture and its eclipse,
In a way like an angel's. Of Elvira
The first thing that I saw - such years ago -
Was her smile and also it was the last.

Jorge Luis Borges

#45. Like every writer, he measured other men's virtues by what they had accomplished, yet asked that other men measure him by what he planned someday to do.

Jorge Luis Borges

#46. My father and he had one of those English friendships which begins by avoiding the intimacies and eventually eliminates speech altogether.

Jorge Luis Borges

#47. 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

#48. I have sometimes suspected that the only thing that holds no mystery is happiness, because it is its own justification.

Jorge Luis Borges

#49. A necessary monster.

Jorge Luis Borges

#50. The Moon"

There is such loneliness in that gold.
The moon of the nights is not the moon
Who the first Adam saw. The long centuries
Of human vigil have filled her
With ancient lament. Look at her. She is your mirror.

Jorge Luis Borges

#51. When a writer dies, he becomes his books.

Jorge Luis Borges

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

Jorge Luis Borges

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

Jorge Luis Borges

#54. Films are even stranger, for what we are seeing are not disguised people but photographs of disguised people, and yet we believe them while the film is being shown.

Jorge Luis Borges

#55. I hardly know what I'm going to write - an article, a story, a poem in free verse - or in some regular form. I only know that when I have the first sentence. And when the first sentence makes a kind of pattern, then I find out the kind of rhythm I'm looking for.

Jorge Luis Borges

#56. Lully's machine, Mill's fear and Lasswitz's chaotic library can be the subject of jokes, but they exaggerate a propensity which is common: making metaphysics and the arts into a kind of play with combinations.

Jorge Luis Borges

#57. You who read me, are You sure of understanding my language?

Jorge Luis Borges

#58. Had the poet said so in so many words, he would have been far less effective. Because, as I understand it, anything suggested is far more effective than anything laid down. Perhaps the human mind has a tendency to deny a statement.

Jorge Luis Borges

#59. I try to avoid purple patches, fine writing, all that kind of thing ... because I think they're a mistake. And then sometimes it comes through and sometimes it doesn't, but that's not up to me. It's up to chance.

Jorge Luis Borges

#60. A writer needs loneliness, and he gets his share of it. He needs love, and he gets shared and also unshared love. He needs friendship. In fact, he needs the universe. To be a writer is, in a sense, to be a day-dreamer - to be living a kind of double life.

Jorge Luis Borges

#61. Let neither tear nor reproach besmirch
this declaration of the mastery
of God who, with magnificent irony,
granted me both the gift of books and the night.

Jorge Luis Borges

#62. There is a labyrinth which is a straight line.

Jorge Luis Borges

#63. 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

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

Jorge Luis Borges

#65. Mirrors in metal, and the masked
Mirror of mahogany that in its mist
Of a red twilight hazes
The face that is gazed on as it gazes

Jorge Luis Borges

#66. We (the indivisible divinity that works in us) have dreamed the world. We have dreamed it resistant, mysterious, visible, ubiquitous in space and firm in time, but we have allowed slight, and eternal, bits of the irrational to form part of its architecture so as to know that it is false.

Jorge Luis Borges

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

Jorge Luis Borges

#68. 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

#69. Paradise will be a kind of library

Jorge Luis Borges

#70. But let no one imagine that we were mere ascetics. There is no more complex pleasure than thought, and it was to thought that we delivered ourselves over.

Jorge Luis Borges

#71. I think most people are more important than their opinions.

Jorge Luis Borges

#72. So witless did these ideas strike me as being, so sweeping and pompous the way they were expressed, that I associated them immediately with literature.

Jorge Luis Borges

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

Jorge Luis Borges

#74. Fame is a form, perhaps the worst form, of incomprehension.

Jorge Luis Borges

#75. 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

#76. The fact is that all writers create their precursors. Their work modifies our conception of the past, just as it is bound to modify the future.

Jorge Luis Borges

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

Jorge Luis Borges

#78. Cervantes' text and Menard's are verbally identical; but the second is almost infinitely richer.

Jorge Luis Borges

#79. To arrange a library is to practice in a quiet and modest way the art of criticism.

Jorge Luis Borges

#80. We are as ignorant of the meaning of the dragon as we are of the meaning of the universe.

Jorge Luis Borges

#81. A man sets himself the task of portraying the world. Shortly before he dies he discovers that this patient labyrinth of lines is a drawing of his own face.

Jorge Luis Borges

#82. 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

#83. Before unearthing this letter, I had questioned myself about the ways in which a book can be infinite. I could think of nothing other than a cyclic volume, a circular one. A book whose last page was identical with the first, a book which had the possibility of continuing indefinitely.

Jorge Luis Borges

#84. I have always come to life after coming to books.

Jorge Luis Borges

#85. Writing is only a guided dream.

Jorge Luis Borges

#86. The art of writing is mysterious, the opinions we hold are ephemeral ...

Jorge Luis Borges

#87. Whatever one man does, it is as if all men did it. For that reason, it is not unfair that one disobedience in a garden should contaminate all humanity; for that reason it is not unjust that the crucifixion of a single Jew should be sufficient to save it.

Jorge Luis Borges

#88. Why a should a dream be any less real than this table. Or Macbeth be less real than today's newspaper.

Jorge Luis Borges

#89. I have committed the worst of sins one can commit ... I have not been happy.

Jorge Luis Borges

#90. I am almost sure to be blotted out by death, but sometimes I think it is not impossible that I may continue to live in some other manner after my physical death . Or, as Hamlet wonders, what dreams will come when we leave this body?

Jorge Luis Borges