Jorge Luis Borges Quotes

I'm alone and nobody is in the mirror

I do not know which of us has written this page.

I owe my first inkling of the problem of infinity to a large biscuit tin that was a source of vertiginous mystery during my childhood.

Lost in these imaginary illusions I forgot my destiny – that of the hunted.

There is nothing but quotations left for us. Our language is a system of quotations.

To think is to ignore the differences, to generalize, to abstract.

The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite, perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries.

The Library is a sphere whose exact centre is any one of its hexagons and whose circumference is inaccessible.

So my life is a point-counterpoint, a kind of fugue, and a falling away–and everything winds up being lost to me, and everything falls into oblivion, or into the hands of the other man.

If honor and wisdom and happiness are not for me, let them be for others. Let heaven exist, though my place be in hell.

But let no one imagine that we were mere ascetics. There is no more complex pleasure than thought, and it was to thought that we delivered ourselves over.

The story of two dreams is a coincidence, a line drawn by chance, like the shapes of lions or horses that are sometimes formed by clouds.

When a writer dies, he becomes his books.

The image of the Lord has been replaced by a mirror.

I came to abominate my body, I came to sense that two eyes, two hands, two lungs are as monstrous as two faces.

Art is fire plus algebra.

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

... in art nothing is more secondary than the author's intentions.

All men who repeat a line from Shakespeare are William Shakespeare

Patriotism, that least discerning of pas

Day and night, their frail and crippled ships defy the tempest.

Unappreciated because too many of his [Rudyard Kipling's] peers were socialists.

I think—the hero observes that nothing is so frightening as a labyrinth with no center.

What you really value is what you miss not what you have.

I believe the secret of the success of psychoanalysis resides in people's vanity.

Any life is made up of a single moment, the moment in which a man finds out, once and for all, who he is.

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.