Jorge Luis Borges Quotes
I never reread what I've written. I'm far too afraid to feel ashamed of what I've done.
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.
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.
When you come right down to it, opinions are the most superficial things about anyone
The earth we inhabit is an error, an incompetent parody. Mirrors and paternity are abominable because they multiply and affirm it.
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.
Beyond my anxiety, beyond this writing, the universe waits, inexhaustible, inviting.
I have sometimes suspected that the only thing that holds no mystery is happiness, because it is its own justification.
The flattery of posterity is not worth much more than contemporary flattery, which is worth nothing.
My father and he had cemented one of those English friendships which begin by avoiding intimacies and eventually eliminate speech altogether.
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.
Literature is not exhaustible, for the sufficient and simple reason that a single book is not.
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.
What will die with me when I die, what pathetic or fragile form will the world lose?
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.
I think that the reader should enrich what he is reading. He should misunderstand the text; he should change it into something else.
Films are even stranger, for what we are seeing are not disguised people but photographs of disguised people, and yet we believe them while the film is being shown.
A writer - and, I believe, generally all persons - must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource.
Every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.
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.
He constructed a vast labyrinthine of periods, made impassable by the piling-up of clauses upon clauses-clauses in which oversight and bad grammar seemed manifestations of disdain.
In the critics' vocabulary, the work 'precursor' is indispensable, but it should be cleansed of all connotations of polemics or rivalry.
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 may be that universal history is the history of the different intonations given a handful of metaphors.
The mathematical sciences wield their particular language made of digits and signs, no less subtle than any other.
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 universe is composed of an indefinite and perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries.
It's a shame that we have to choose between two such second-rate countries as the USSR and the USA.
We are as ignorant of the meaning of the dragon as we are of the meaning of the universe.
It means much to have loved, to have been happy, to have laid my hand on the living Garden, even for a day.
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.
The word happiness exists in every language; it is plausible the thing itself exists.
