Top 338 Quotes & Sayings by Jorge Luis Borges
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an Argentinian poet Jorge Luis Borges.
Last updated on September 16, 2024.
Democracy is an abuse of statistics.
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.
The original is unfaithful to the translation.
To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god.
The central problem of novel-writing is causality.
I cannot walk through the suburbs in the solitude of the night without thinking that the night pleases us because it suppresses idle details, just as our memory does.
Reality is not always probable, or likely.
In the order of literature, as in others, there is no act that is not the coronation of an infinite series of causes and the source of an infinite series of effects.
The flattery of posterity is not worth much more than contemporary flattery, which is worth nothing.
To die for a religion is easier than to live it absolutely.
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.
My undertaking is not difficult, essentially. I should only have to be immortal to carry it out.
There is a concept that is the corrupter and destroyer of all others. I speak not of Evil, whose limited empire is that of ethics; I speak of the infinite.
I have known uncertainty: a state unknown to the Greeks.
I foresee that man will resign himself each day to new abominations, and soon that only bandits and soldiers will be left.
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.
Nothing is built on stone; all is built on sand, but we must build as if the sand were stone.
Art always opts for the individual, the concrete; art is not Platonic.
I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.
Reading is an activity subsequent to writing: more resigned, more civil, more intellectual.
Writing is nothing more than a guided dream.
One concept corrupts and confuses the others. I am not speaking of the Evil whose limited sphere is ethics; I am speaking of the infinite.
The Falklands thing was a fight between two bald men over a comb.
To be immortal is commonplace; except for man, all creatures are immortal, for they are ignorant of death; what is divine, terrible, incomprehensible, is to know that one is immortal.
Life itself is a quotation.
Life and death have been lacking in my life.
The truth is that we live out our lives putting off all that can be put off; perhaps we all know deep down that we are immortal and that sooner or later all men will do and know all things.
Poetry remembers that it was an oral art before it was a written art.
In general, every country has the language it deserves.
Like all those possessing a library, Aurelian was aware that he was guilty of not knowing his in its entirety.
Any life is made up of a single moment, the moment in which a man finds out, once and for all, who he is.
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.
Of all man’s instruments, the most wondrous, no doubt, is the book. The other instruments are extensions of his body. The microscope, the telescope, are extensions of his sight; the telephone is the extension of his voice; then we have the plow and the sword, extensions of the arm. But the book is something else altogether: the book is an extension of memory and imagination.
Time can't be measured in days the way money is measured in pesos and centavos, because all pesos are equal, while every day, perhaps every hour, is different.
Poets, like the blind, can see in the dark.
All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.
The worst labyrinth is not that intricate form that can entrap us forever, but a single and precise straight line
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.
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.
Dictatorships foster oppression, dictatorships foster servitude, dictatorships foster cruelty; more abominable is the fact that they foster idiocy.
What you really value is what you miss, not what you have.
While we are asleep in this world, we are awake in another one
I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities I have visited.
So plant your own gardens and decorate your own soul, instead of waiting for someone to bring you flowers.
In my next life I will try to commit more errors.
The mind was dreaming. The world was its dream.
I have committed the worst of sins one can commit... I have not been happy.
When writers die they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarnation.
We accept reality so readily - perhaps because we sense that nothing is real.
The fact is that poetry is not the books in the library . . . Poetry is the encounter of the reader with the book, the discovery of the book.
Being with you and not being with you is the only way I have to measure time.
Truth never penetrates an unwilling mind.
Doubt is one of the names of intelligence.
The future has no other reality than as present hope, and the past is no more than present memory.
Creativity is suspended between memory and forgetting.
Censorship is the mother of metaphor.
From my weakness, I drew strength that never left me.
Don't talk unless you can improve the silence.
Time forks perpetually toward innumerable futures.
I cannot sleep unless I am surrounded by books.
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