Jorge Luis Borges Quotes

I live in a grey world, rather like the silver screen world. But yellow stands out.

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

To bless thine enemy is a good way to satisfy thy vanity.

The art of writing is mysterious, the opinions we hold are ephemeral.

Yo, que me figuraba el Paraíso / Bajo la especie de una biblioteca. I have always imagined Paradise as a kind of library.

Canada is so far away it hardly exists.

Mir Bahadur Ali is, as we have seen, incapable of evading the most vulgar of art's temptations: that of being a genius.

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

Imprecision is tolerable and verisimilar in literature, because we always tend towards it in life.

I don't think esthetic schools are important. What is important is the use that is made of them, or whatever the individual writer does.

In truth, the Library includes all verbal structures, all variations permitted by the twenty-five orthographical symbols, but not a single example of absolute nonsense.

Time broadens the scope of verses and I know of some which, like music, are everything for all men.

I have no personal system of philosophy. I never attempt to do that. I am merely a man of letters.

I'm not interested in the fact that a writer may label himself as being intellectual or anti-intellectual. l'm really interested in the stuff he's turning out.

I think it's all to the good that a writer shouldn't be too famous. Because, in a country where a writer may be famous, he may be pandering to the mob, celebrity and so on.

On the floor, and hanging on to the bar, squatted an old man, immobile as an object. His years had reduced and polished him as water does a stone or the generations of men do a sentence.

Writing is only a guided dream.

Unlike the novel, a short story may be, for all purposes, essential.

As the end approaches, there are no longer any images from memory - there are only words.

Like all those possessing a library, Aurelian was aware that he was guilty of not knowing his in its entirety.

I secretly assumed, as poets do, The duty on me to define the moon.

I don't think there's any essential difference, at least for me, between writing poetry and writing prose.

For myth is at the beginning of literature, and also at its end.

The certainty that everything has already been written annuls us, or renders us phantasmal.

There is a concept which corrupts and upsets all others. I refer not to Evil, whose limited realm is that of ethics; I refer to the infinite.

The steps a man takes from the day of his birth until that of his death trace in time an inconcievable figure. The Divine Mind intuitively grasps that form immediately, as men do a triangle.

I wonder if I have woven through dreams the sexual strife. I don't think so. But after all, my business is to weave dreams. I suppose I may be allowed to choose the material.

I am attracted to fantastic writing, and fantastic reading, of course. But I think things that we call fantastic may be real, in the sense of being real symbols.

What man of us has never felt, walking through the twilight or writing down a date from his past, that he has lost something infinite?

All literature, is, finally autobiographical.

When writers die they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarnation.", The New Yorker, July 7, 1986]

A writer always begins by being too complicated—he’s playing at several games at once.

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

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.

I prayed aloud, less to plead for divine favor than to intimidate the tribe with articulate speech.

When writers die they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarna

Paradise will be a kind of library

It must be that I am not made to be a dead man, but these places and this discussion seem like a dream, and not a dream dreamed by me but by someone else still to be born.

In my soul the afternoon grows wider and I reflect.

Reading . . . is an activity subsequent to writing: more resigned, more civil, more intellectual.

Tearing money is an impiety, like throwing away bread.

I suspected once that any human life, however intricate and full it might be, consisted in reality of one moment: the moment when a man knows for all time who he is.

Blind to all fault, destiny can be ruthless at one's slightest distraction.

We spend our lives waiting for our book and it never comes.

Time forks perpetually toward innumerable futures. In one of them I am your enemy.

So witless did these ideas strike me as being, so sweeping and pompous the way they were expressed, that I associated them immediately with literature.

I've fixed my feelings into durable wordswhen they could have been spent on tenderness

I cannot lament the loss of a love or a friendship without meditating that one loses only what one really never had.

Useless to tell myself that a dreamand the memory of yesterday are the same thing

Man's memory shapesIts own Eden within