Jorge Luis Borges Quotes page 2

“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.”

Source: Dreamtigers

“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”

Source: The Aleph and Other Stories

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

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

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

Source: Ficciones

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

Source: Ficciones

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

Source: Dreamtigers

“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.”

Source: Dreamtigers

“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.”

Source: Ficciones

“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…”

"The Secret Miracle"; Variant: Like all writers, he measured the achievements of others by what they had accomplished, asking of them that they measure him by what he envisaged or planned.
Source: Ficciones (1944)

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

Source: The Aleph and Other Stories

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

Source: Collected Fictions

“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...”

Source: Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings

“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.”

The Garden of Forking Paths (1942), The Garden of Forking Paths
Source: Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings

Jorge Luis Borges book Other Inquisitions

"Note on (toward) Bernard Shaw"
Variant translation: A book is not an autonomous entity: it is a relation, an axis of innumerable relations. One literature differs from another, be it earlier or later, not because of the texts but because of the way they are read: if I could read any page from the present time — this one, for instance — as it will be read in the year 2000, I would know what the literature of the year 2000 would be like.
Other Inquisitions (1952)

“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.”

Variant: I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.

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

"A Biography of Tadeo Isidoro Cruz", in The Aleph (1949); tr. Andrew Hurley, Collected Fictions (1998)
Variant: Any life, no matter how long and complex it may be, is made up of a single moment — the moment in which a man finds out, once and for all, who he is.

“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”

Source: Collected Fictions

“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.”

"Three Versions of Judas"
Ficciones (1944)

“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 Aleph" ["El Aleph"] (1945)

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

"The Waiting" translated by James E. Irby (1959)

“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.”

"Hakim, the Masked Dyer of Merv", in A Universal History of Iniquity (1935); tr. Andrew Hurley, Collected Fictions (1998). Cf. Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius (1940)