Top 100 Luis Borges Quotes
#1. My friend you must understand that time forks perpetually into countless futures. And in at least one of them I have become your enemy. Jorge Luis Borges, The Garden of Forking Paths (1941)
Adrian McKinty
#2. I read Borges, Jorge Luis Borges. He think he too good for me, but I love him ... he was a blind man who see better than anyone
Sheridan Hay
#3. One of my favorite writers is short story writer/essayist Jorge Luis Borges, who was blind. I'm not claiming to be anything remotely resembling a talent of Borges' caliber, but he is an inspiration and a proof that one can be a meaningful and successful writer while blind.
Larry Howes
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. Centuries of centuries and only in the present do things happen. - JORGE LUIS BORGES
Elizabeth Kolbert
#8. [Jorge Luis Borges] had short stories, and I was trying to learn how to write short stories, and then he had these things in the middle that were like fables, and I loved hearing fables.
Sandra Cisneros
#9. Jorge Luis Borges: "I have always imagined that paradise will be a kind of library." "The
Suzanne Kelman
#10. As 'Possession' progresses, it seems less and less like the usual satire about academia and more like something by Jorge Luis Borges.
Jay Parini
#11. 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
#12. Any life, however long and complicated it may be, actually consists of a single moment - the moment when a man knows forever more who he is.
Jorge Luis Borges
#13. Poetry springs from something deeper; it's beyond intelligence.
Jorge Luis Borges
#14. 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
#15. There is nothing in the world that is not mysterious, but the mystery is more evident in certain things than in others: in the sea, in the eyes of the elders, in the color yellow, and in music.
Jorge Luis Borges
#16. 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
#17. What I'm really concerned about is reaching one person. And that person may be myself for all I know.
Jorge Luis Borges
#18. 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
#19.
,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
#20. The visible universe was an illusion or, more precisely, a sophism. Mirrors and fatherhood are abominable because they multiply it and extend it.
Jorge Luis Borges
#21. 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
#22. In art nothing is more secondary than the author's intentions.
Jorge Luis Borges
#23. I will pause to consider this eternity from which the subsequent ones derive.
Jorge Luis Borges
#24. 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
#25. If you're a writer you're bound to write something fine, at least now and then, off and on.
Jorge Luis Borges
#26. 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
#27. Blind to all fault, destiny can be ruthless at one's slightest distraction.
Jorge Luis Borges
#30. 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
#32. The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite, perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries.
Jorge Luis Borges
#33. In death we shall rediscover all the instants of our life and we shall freely combine them as in dreams.
Jorge Luis Borges
#34. The future is inevitable and precise, but it may not occur. God lurks in the gaps.
Jorge Luis Borges
#36. I ask of any God, of any gods, that if they give immortality, I hope to be granted oblivion also.
Jorge Luis Borges
#37. 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
#38. That is what always happens: we never know whether we are victors or whether we are defeated.
Jorge Luis Borges
#39. A writer always begins by being too complicated - he's playing at several games at once.
Jorge Luis Borges
#40. I saw a sunset in Queretaro that seemed to reflect the colour of a rose in Bengal.
Jorge Luis Borges
#41. 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
#42. When people write in favor or against anybody, that hardly helps or hurts them ... man can be done or undone by his own writing, not by what other people say of him.
Jorge Luis Borges
#43. 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
#44. At a certain point talk about 'essence' and 'oneness' and the universal becomes more tautological than inquisitive.
Christopher Hitchens
#45. You have wakened not out of sleep, but into a prior dream, and that dream lies within another, and so on, to infinity, which is the number of grains of sand. The path that you are to take is endless, and you will die before you have truly awakened.
Jorge Luis Borges
#46. What bitter slavishness, that of my face, that of one of my former faces. This odious fate reserved for my features must perforce make me odious too, but I no longer care.
Jorge Luis Borges
#47. 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
#48. Every novel is an ideal plane inserted into the realm of reality.
Jorge Luis Borges
#49. 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
#50. What man of us has never felt, walking through the twilight or writing down a date from his past, that he has lost something infinite?
Jorge Luis Borges
#51. The present is the instant in which the future crumbles into the past.
Jorge Luis Borges
#52. If honor and wisdom and happiness are not for me, let them be for others. Let heaven exist, though my place be in hell. Let me be outraged and annihilated, but for one instant, in one being, let Your enormous Library be justified.
Jorge Luis Borges
#53. My books standing there on the shelf do not know that I have written them.
Jorge Luis Borges
#55. Sometimes a few birds, a horse, have saved the ruins of an amphitheater.
Jorge Luis Borges
#56. In spite of these three obstacles, Menard's fragmentary _Quixote_ is more subtle than Cervantes'.
Jorge Luis Borges
#57. The earth we inhabit is an error, an incompetent parody. Mirrors and paternity are abominable because they multiply and affirm it.
Jorge Luis Borges
#58. 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
#59. The voice of the Lord answered from a whirlwind: "Neither am I anyone; I have dreamt the world as you dreamt your work, my Shakespeare, and among the forms in my dream are you, who like myself are many and no one.
Jorge Luis Borges
#60. 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
#61. It's a shame that we have to choose between two such second-rate countries as the USSR and the USA.
Jorge Luis Borges
#62. His life, measured in space and time, will take up a mere few lines, which my ignorance will abbreviate further.
Jorge Luis Borges
#64. 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
#65. The word happiness exists in every language; it is plausible the thing itself exists.
Jorge Luis Borges
#70. The ascetic, for the greater glory of God, degrades and mortifies the flesh; Judas did the same with the spirit. He renounced honor, good, peace, the Kingdom of Heaven, as others, less heroically, renounced pleasure.
Jorge Luis Borges
#71. Loneliness does not worry me; life is difficult enough, putting up with yourself and with your own habits.
Jorge Luis Borges
#72. Heaven and hell seem out of proportion to me: the actions of men do not deserve so much.
Jorge Luis Borges
#73. The web of time - the strands of which approach one another, bifurcate, intersect, or ignore each other through the centuries - embraces "every" possibility. We do not exist in most of them. In some you exist and not I, while in others I do, and you do not, and in yet others both of us exist.
Jorge Luis Borges
#75. The mathematical sciences wield their particular language made of digits and signs, no less subtle than any other.
Jorge Luis Borges
#76. 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
#77. 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
#78. 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
#79. As a boy, I used to marvel that the letters in a closed book did not get scrambled and lost overnight.
Jose Luis Borges
#80. 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
#81. Dictatorships foster oppression, dictatorships foster servitude, dictatorships foster cruelty; more abominable is the fact that they foster idiocy.
Jorge Luis Borges
#82. I'm not interested in the fact that a writer may label himself as being intellectual or anti-intellectual. l'm really interested in the stuff he's turning out.
Jorge Luis Borges
#83. 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
#85. 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
#86. He [Omar Khayyam] is an atheist, but knows how to interpret in orthodox style the most difficult passages of the Koran; for every educated man is a theologian and faith is not a requisite.
Jorge Luis Borges
#88. God moves the player, and he, the piece.
Which god behind God begets the plot
Of dust and time and dream and agonies.
Jorge Luis Borges
#89. So plant your own gardens and decorate your own soul, instead of waiting for someone to bring you flowers.
Jorge Luis Borges
#90. The I feel a contentment in defeat, I reflected, simply because defeat has come, because it is infinitely connected to all the acts that are, that were, and that shall be, because to censure or deplore a single real act is to blaspheme against the universe.
Jorge Luis Borges
#91. 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
#92. I might accept immortality, if I had to do it. But I would prefer - if there is any afterlife - to know nothing whatever about Borges, about his experiences in this world.
Jorge Luis Borges
#93. 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
#94. 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
#95. It also occurred to him that throughout history, humankind has told two stories: the story of a lost ship sailing the Mediterranean seas in quest of a beloved isle, and the story of a god who allows himself to be crucified on Golgotha.
Jorge Luis Borges
#97. Words, displaced and mutilated words, words of others, were the poor pittance left him by the hours and the centuries.
Jorge Luis Borges
#98. 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
#99. 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
#100. I remember him with a dark passionflower in his hand, looking at it as no one has ever looked at such a flower, though they might look from the twilight of day until the twilight of night, for a whole life long.
Jorge Luis Borges
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