Jorge Luis Borges Quotes

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“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.”

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

“Man's memory shapes
Its own Eden within”

“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?”

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

“We accept reality so readily - perhaps because we sense that nothing is real.”

“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.”

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

“i walk slowly, like one who comes from so far away he doesn't expect to arrive.”

“It means much to have loved, to have been happy, to have laid my hand on the living Garden, even for a day.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“Paradise will be a kind of library”

“Fame is a form, perhaps the worst form, of incomprehension.”

“From my weakness, I drew strength that never left me.”

“The machinery of the world is far too complex for the simplicity of men.”

“We have shared out, like thieves, the amazing treasures of days and nights.”

“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.”

“Loneliness does not worry me; life is difficult enough, putting up with yourself and with your own habits.”

“It only takes two facing mirrors to build a labyrinth.”

“The task of art is to transform what is continuously happening to us, to transform all of these things into symbols, into music, into something which can last in man’s memory. That is our duty. If we don’t fulfill it, we feel unhappy.”

“To think, analyze and invent are not anomalous acts, but the normal respiration of the intelligence.”

“The certainty that everything has already been written annuls us, or renders us phantasmal.”

“Happy are the beloved and the lovers and those who can live without love.”

“Like every writer, he measured the virtues of other writers by their performance, and asked that they measure him by what he conjectured or planned.”

“I saw all the mirrors on earth and none of them reflected me…”

“He consorted with prostitutes and poets… and with persons even worse.”

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

“With relief, with humiliation, with terror, he understood that he too was a mere appearance, dreamt by another.”

“I reflected that everything happens to a man precisely, precisely now. Centuries of centuries and only in the present do things happen; countless men in the air, on the face of the earth and the sea, and all that really is happening is happening to me...”

“Literature is not exhaustible, for the sufficient and simple reason that a single book is not. A book is not an isolated entity: it is a narration, an axis of innumerable narrations. One literature differs from another, either before or after it, not so much because of the text as for the manner in which it is read.”

“It's a shame that we have to choose between two such second-rate countries as the USSR and the USA.”

“I have always imagined that Paradise will be some kind of library.”

“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.”

“God must not engage in theology. The writer must not destroy by human reasonings the faith that art requires of us.”

“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.”

“When I wake up, I wake to something worse. It’s the astonishment of being myself”

“In adultery, there is usually tenderness and self-sacrifice; in murder, courage; in profanation and blasphemy, a certain satanic splendour. Judas elected those offences unvisited by any virtues: abuse of confidence and informing.”

“I saw the delicate bone structure of a hand; I saw the survivors of a battle sending out post cards... I saw the oblique shadow of some ferns on the floor of a hot-house; I saw tigers, emboli, bison, ground swells and armies; I saw all the ants in the world.”

“Villari took no notice of them because the idea of a coincidence between art and reality was alien to him. Unlike people who read novels, he never saw himself as a character in a work of art.”

“The earth we inhabit is an error, an incompetent parody. Mirrors and paternity are abominable because they multiply and affirm it.”

“I thought of a labyrinth of labyrinths, of one sinuous spreading labyrinth that would encompass the past and the future and in some way involve the stars.”

“Do you want to see what human eyes have never seen? Look at the moon. Do you want to hear what ears have never heard? Listen to the bird's cry. Do you want to touch what hands have never touched? Touch the earth. Verily I say that God is about to create the world.”

“The geometry of Tlön comprises two somewhat different disciplines: the visual and the tactile. The latter corresponds to our own geometry and is subordinated to the first.”

“His many years had reduced and polished him the way water smooths and polishes a stone or generations of men polish a proverb.”