Jorge Luis Borges Quotes

Many of the characters are fools and they're always playing tricks on me and treating me badly.

The sea is an idiom I cannot decipher.

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.

In Spanish it is very difficult to make things flow, because words are over-long. But in English, you have light words.

Whoever would undertake some atrocious enterprise should act as if it were already accomplished should impose upon himself a future as irrevocable as the past.

No one is anyone, one single immortal man is all men. Like Cornelius Agrippa, I am god, I am hero, I am philosopher, I am demon and I am world, which is a tedious way of saying that I do not exist.

You who read me, are You sure of understanding my language?

His life, measured in space and time, will take up a mere few lines, which my ignorance will abbreviate further.

Reality is not always probable, or likely. But if you're writing a story, you have to make it as plausible as you can, because if not, the reader's imagination will reject it.

My advanced age has taught me the resignation of being Borges.

In fact I'm in too much of a mental muddle to know where I am - an idealist or not. I'm a mere man of letters, and I do what I can with those subjects.

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.

I have always come to life after coming to books.

When I feel I'm going to write something, then I just am quiet and I try to listen. Then something comes through. And I do what I can in order not to tamper with it.

When one confesses to an act, one ceases to be an actor in it and becomes its witness, becomes a man that observes and narrates it and no longer the man that performed it.

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

A man sets himself the task of portraying the world. Shortly before he dies he discovers that this patient labyrinth of lines is a drawing of his own face.

It seemed incredible to me that day without premonitions or symbols should be the one of my inexorable death .

All theories are legitimate, no matter. What matters is what you do with them.

I have no way of knowing whether the events that I am about to narrate are effects or causes.

It seemed incredible that this day, a day without warnings or omens, might be that of my implacable death.

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

The future is as irrevocable as an inflexible yesterday.

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

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

I think most people are more important than their opinions.

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.

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

Death is just infinity closing in.

In all fiction, when a man is faced with alternatives he chooses one at the expense of others.

I ask of any God, of any gods, that if they give immortality, I hope to be granted oblivion also.

The heresies we should fear are those which can be confused with orthodoxy.

There is no point in being overwhelmed by the appalling total of human sufferring; such a total does not exist. Neither poverty nor pain is accumulable.

I would rather like to think of God as being a kind of adventurer - even as Wells thought about him - or perhaps as something within us making for some unknown purpose.

The possibilities of the art of combination are not infinite, but they tend to be frightful.

Blindness has not been for me a total misfortune; it should not be seen in a pathetic way. It should be seen as a way of life: one of the styles of living.

Let neither tear nor reproach besmirch this declaration of the mastery of God who, with magnificent irony, granted me both the gift of books and the night.

All writing is dreaming

There is no intellectual exercise which is not ultimately useless.

This web of time--the strands of which approach one another, bifurcate, intersect or ignore eachother through the centuries--embrace every posibility.

Best thing to happen for a poet. A fine death, no? An impressive death.

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

I will pause to consider this eternity from which the subsequent ones derive.

That one individual should awaken in another memories that belong to still a third is an obvious paradox.

The poverty of yesterday was less squalid than the poverty we purchase with our industry today. Fortunes were smaller then as well.

That is what always happens: we never know whether we are victors or whether we are defeated.

My father gave me free run of his library. When I think of my boyhood, I think in terms of the books I read.

It only takes two facing mirrors to build a labyrinth.

If a writer disbelieves what he is writing, then he can hardly expect his reader to believe it.

Im merely a dreamer, and then a writer, and my happiest moments are when I'm a reader.