Top 338 Quotes & Sayings by Jorge Luis Borges - Page 2

Only in the present do things happen.

When I write, I do it urged by an intimate necessity. I don't have in mind an exclusive public, or a public of multitudes, I don't think in either thing. I think about expressing what I want to say. I try to do it in the simplest way possible.

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.

The tango is a direct expression of something that poets have often tried to state in words: the belief that a fight may be a celebration.

The future is inevitable and precise, but it may not occur. God lurks in the gaps.

For me, beauty is a physical sensation, something we feel with our whole body. It is not the result of judgement. We do not arrive at it by way of rules. We either feel beauty or we don't.

Let others pride themselves about how many pages they have written; I'd rather boast about the ones I've read.

Being an agnostic means all things are possible, even God, even the Holy Trinity. This world is so strange that anything may happen, or may not happen. Being an agnostic makes me live in a larger, a more fantastic kind of world, almost uncanny. It makes me more tolerant.

If space is infinite, we may be at any point in space. If time is infinite, we may be at any point in time.

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.

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.

I saw all the mirrors on earth and none of them reflected me.

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

Soccer is popular because stupidity is popular.

La duda es uno de los nombres de la inteligencia.

I think of reading a book as no less an experience than travelling or falling in love.

There's no need to build a labyrinth when the entire universe is one.

Art is endless like a river flowing, passing, yet remaining.

I have preferred to teach my students not English literature but my love for certain authors, or, even better, certain pages, or even better than that, certain lines. One falls in love with a line, then with a page, then with an author. Well, why not? It is a beautiful process.

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

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.

Sometimes, looking at the many books I have at home, I feel I shall die before I come to the end of them, yet I cannot resist the temptation of buying new books. Whenever I walk into a bookstore and find a book on one of my hobbies — for example, Old English or Old Norse poetry — I say to myself, “What a pity I can’t buy that book, for I already have a copy at home.

The mightiest love was granted him Love that does not expect to be loved.

I write for myself, and perhaps for half a dozen friends. And that should be enough. And that might improve the quality of my writing. But if I were writing for thousands of people, then I would write what might please them. And as I know nothing about them, and maybe I'd have a rather low opinion of them, I don't think that would do any good to my work.

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

Each thing implies the universe.

Everything touches everything.

I am not sure of anything, I know nothing . . . can you imagine that I don't even know the date of my own death?

Time is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire.

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.

May Heaven exist, even if my place is Hell.

My books standing there on the shelf do not know that I have written them.

I had always thought of Paradise / In form and image as a library.

To arrange a library is to practice in a quiet and modest way the art of criticism.

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.

A writer, or any man, must believe that whatever happens to him is an instrument; everything has been given for an end. This is even stronger in the case of the artist. Everything that happens, including humiliations, embarrassments, misfortunes, all has been given like clay, like material for one's art. One must accept it.

Time is the tiger that devours me, but I am that tiger.

We (the indivisible divinity that works in us) have dreamed the world. We have dreamed it resistant, mysterious, visible, ubiquitous in space and firm in time, but we have allowed slight, and eternal, bits of the irrational to form part of its architecture so as to know that it is false.

I never reread what I've written. I'm far too afraid to feel ashamed of what I've done.

A . . . poet is a discoverer rather than an inventor.

No one is a poet from eight to twelve and from two to six. Whoever is a poet is one always, and continually assaulted by poetry.

Israelites, Christians and Muslims profess immortality, but the veneration they render this world proves they believe only in it, since they destine all other worlds, in infinite number, to be its reward or punishment.

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

A book is a physical object in a world of physical objects. It is a set of dead symbols. And then the right reader comes along, and the words—or rather the poetry behind the words, for the words themselves are mere symbols—spring to life, and we have a resurrection of the word.

What will die with me when I die, what pathetic or fragile form will the world lose?

How can we manage to illuminate the pathos of our lives?

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

I have always come to life after coming to books.

We have a very precise image - an image at times shameless - of what we have lost, but we are ignorant of what may follow or replace it.

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.

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.

The future is as irrevocable as an inflexible yesterday.

I gazed at every mirror on the planet, not one gave back my reflection.

I foresee that man will resign himself each day to new abominations, and soon that only bandits and soldiers will be left...

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.

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.

A writer needs loneliness, and he gets his share of it. He needs love, and he gets shared and also unshared love. He needs friendship. In fact, he needs the universe. To be a writer is, in a sense, to be a day-dreamer - to be living a kind of double life.

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.

I think most people are more important than their opinions.

I believe that in time we will have reached the point where we will deserve to be free of government.