Jorge Luis Borges Quotes (55 Quotes)

Another school declares that all time has already transpired and that our life is only the crepuscular and no doubt falsified and mutilated memory or reflection of an irrecoverable process. Another, that the history of the universe - and in it our lives and the most tenuous detail of our lives - is the scripture produced by a subordinate god in order to communicate with a demon. Another, that the universe is comparable to those cryptographs in which not all the symbols are valid...

We can handle all European themes, handle them without superstition, with an irreverence which can have, and already does have, fortunate consequences.

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

Whatever one man does, it is as if all men did it. For that reason, it is not unfair that one disobedience in a garden should contaminate all humanity; for that reason it is not unjust that the crucifixion of a single Jew should be sufficient to save it.

Fame is a form, perhaps the worst form, of incomprehension.

With relief, with humiliation, with terror, he understood that he too was a mere appearance, dreamt by another.

He consorted with prostitutes and poets...and with persons even worse.

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

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.

Reality is partial to symmetry and slight anachronisms

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.

Sometimes a few birds, a horse, have saved the ruins of an amphitheater.

Then he reflected that reality does not usually coincide with our anticipation of it; with a logic of his own he inferred that to forsee a circumstantial detail is to prevent its happening. Trusting in this weak magic, he invented, so that they would not happen, the most gruesome details.

To say good-bye is to deny separation; it is to say Today we play at going our own ways, but we'll see each other tomorrow. Men invented farewells because they somehow knew themselves to be immortal, even while seeing themselves as contingent and ephemeral.

Upstream, Arkansas and Ohio have their bottomlands, too, populated by a jaundiced and hungry-looking race, prone to fevers, whose eyes gleam at the sight of stone and iron, for they know only sand and driftwood and muddy water.

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.

I know what the Greeks do not know, incertitude.

My taste runs to hourglasses, maps, seventeenth-century typefaces, etymologies, the taste of coffee, and the prose of Robert Louis Stevenson.

Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire.

Life itself is a quotation.

Poetry remembers that it was an oral art before it was a written art.

My undertaking is not difficult, essentially. I should only have to be immortal to carry it out.

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.

Santa Claus has the right idea. Visit people once a year.

If you don't know - thats what life is made of,
Don't lose the now!

Reality is not always probable, or likely.

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

Time is the substance from which I am made. Time is a river which carries me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger that devours me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire.

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.

What a writer wants to do is not what he does.

Writing is nothing more than a guided dream.

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.

In general, every country has the language it deserves.

To be immortal is commonplace; except for man, all creatures are immortal, for they are ignorant of death; what is divine, terrible, incomprehensible, is to know that one is immortal.

The flattery of posterity is not worth much more than contemporary flattery, which is worth nothing.

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

Life and death have been lacking in my life.

I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.

Every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.

The original is unfaithful to the translation.

To die for a religion is easier than to live it absolutely.

Art always opts for the individual, the concrete; art is not Platonic.

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

The infinite is a concept which corrupts and upsets all others.

Nothing is built on stone; all is built on sand, but we must build as if the sand were stone.

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.

I cannot walk through the suburbs in the solitude of the night without thinking that the night pleases us because it suppresses idle details, just as our memory does.

There is a concept that is the corrupter and destroyer of all others. I speak not of Evil, whose limited empire is that of ethics; I speak of the infinite.

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

The central problem of novel-writing is causality.