Jorge Luis Borges: Trending quotes

Jorge Luis Borges trending quotes. Read the latest quotes in collection
Jorge Luis Borges: 426 quotes11 likes

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

Jorge Luis Borges

Source: Collected Fictions

“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

“There are those who seek the love of a woman to forget her, to not think about her.”

Jorge Luis Borges

Source: The Aleph and Other Stories

“Man's memory shapes
Its own Eden within”

Jorge Luis Borges Dreamtigers

Source: Dreamtigers

“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 Dreamtigers

Source: Dreamtigers

“Like all those possessing a library, Aurelian was aware that he was guilty of not knowing his in its entirety.”

Jorge Luis Borges book The Theologians

The Theologians, translated by James E. Irby (1964)

“I thought that a man can be an enemy of other men, of the moments of other men, but not of a country: not of fireflies, words, gardens, streams of water, sunsets.”

Jorge Luis Borges

The Garden of Forking Paths (1942), The Garden of Forking Paths

“The dictionary is based on the hypothesis -- obviously an unproven one -- that languages are made up of equivalent synonyms.”

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 book Brodie's Report

Source: Brodie's Report

“A book is not an isolated being: it is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships”

Jorge Luis Borges book Ficciones

"Note on (toward) Bernard Shaw" ["Nota sobre (hacia) Bernard Shaw"] (1951)
Other Inquisitions (1952)
Source: Ficciones
Context: 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.

“There is an hour of the afternoon when the plain is on the verge of saying something. It never says, or perhaps it says it infinitely, or perhaps we do not understand it, or we understand it and it is untranslatable as music.”

Jorge Luis Borges

“He thought that the rose was to be found in its own eternity and not in his words; and that we may mention or allude to a thing, but not express it.”

Jorge Luis Borges Dreamtigers

Source: Dreamtigers

“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

“I think that the reader should enrich what he is reading. He should misunderstand the text; he should change it into something else.”

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

Source: The Aleph and Other Stories

“Paradise will be a kind of library”

Jorge Luis Borges Dreamtigers

Poem of the Gifts ["Poema de los Dones"]
Dreamtigers (1960)
Variant: I have always imagined Paradise as a kind of library.