Jorge Luis Borges Quotes

If we think of the novel and the epic ... The difference lies in the fact that the important thing about the epic is a hero
a man who is a pattern for all men. While, as Mencken pointed out, the essence of most novels lies in the breaking down of a man, in the degeneration of character. ~ Jorge Luis Borges

Day and night, their fail and crippled ships defy the tempest. ~ Jorge Luis Borges

List of Artists Who Created Fantasy Worlds to Try and Cure Bouts of Sadness
1. Italo Calvino
2. Gabriel Garcia Marquez
3. Jim Henson and Jorge Luis Borges - Labyrinths
4. The creator of MySpace
5. Richard Brautigan
6. J.K. Rowling
7. The inventor of the children's toy Lite-Brite
8. Ann Sexton
9. David Foster Wallace
10. Gaugin and the Caribbean
11. Charles Schulz
12. Liam Rector ~ Shane Jones

This book first arose out of a passage in [Jorge Luis] Borges, out of the laughter that shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of my thought - our thought that bears the stamp of our age and our geography - breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things, and continuing long afterwards to disturb and threaten with collapse our age-old distinction between the Same and the Other. This passage quotes a 'certain Chinese encyclopaedia' in which it is written that 'animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) suckling pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies'. In the wonderment of this taxonomy, the thing we apprehend in one great leap, the thing that, by means of the fable, is demonstrated as the exotic charm of another system of thought, is the limitation of our own, the stark impossibility of thinking that. ~ Michel Foucault

The curious thing about The Ring and the Book, to which I will now return, is that although each character recounts the same events, and although there is no difference in what they tell, there is a fundamental difference, which belongs to the realm of human psychology, the fact that each of us believes we are justified. For example, the count admits he is a murderer, but the word "murderer" is too general. We know this from reading other books. ~ Jorge Luis Borges

How strange
it is. For perfect things in poetry do not seem strange;
they seem inevitable. And so we hardly thank the
writer for his pains. ~ Jorge Luis Borges

If you sell, say, two thousand copies, it is the same thing as if you had sold nothing at all because two thousand is too vast - I mean, for the imagination to grasp. While thirty-seven people - perhaps thirty-seven are too many, perhaps seventeen would have been better or even seven - but still thirty-seven are still within the scope of one's imagination. ~ Jorge Luis Borges

In this night too, in this night of his mortal eyes into which he was now descending, love and danger were again waiting ...
a murmur of glory and hexameters, of men defending a temple the gods will not save, and of black vessels searching the sea for a beloved isle;
the murmor of the Odysseys and Iliads it was his destiny to sing and leave echoing concavely in the memory of man.
These things we know, but not those he felt descending into the last shade of all. ~ Jorge Luis Borges

Like all the men of Babylon, I have been proconsul; like all, I have been a slave. I have known omnipotence, ignominy, imprisonment. ~ Jorge Luis Borges

I, that used to figure Paradise
In the guise of a library ~ Jorge Luis Borges

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. ~ Jorge Luis Borges

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

The art of writing is mysterious, the opinions we hold are ephemeral ... ~ Jorge Luis Borges

Emma dropped the paper. Her first impression was of a weak feeling in her stomach and in her knees; then of blind guilt, of unreality, of coldness, of fear; then she wished that it were already the next day. Immediately afterwards she realized that that wish was futile because the death of her father was the only thing that had happened in the world, and it would go on happening endlessly. ~ Jorge Luis Borges

And I believe there was a rabbi who wrote that the Holy Scriptures were specifically destined, predestined, for each of its readers. That is, it has a different meaning if any of you read it or if I read it, or if it is read by men in the future or in the past. ~ Jorge Luis Borges

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

I ... confirm the fact - with a certain bittersweet melancholy - that everything in the world brings me back to a quotation or a book. ~ Jorge Luis Borges

For me, beauty is a physical sensation, something we feel with our whole body. It is not the result of judgement. We do not arrive at it by way of rules. We either feel beauty or we don't. ~ Jorge Luis Borges

It's a shame that we have to choose between two such second-rate countries as the USSR and the USA. ~ Jorge Luis Borges

There is a river whose waters give
immortality; somewhere there must be
another river whose waters take it away. The
number of rivers is not infinite; an immortal
traveler wandering the world will someday have
drunk from them all. ~ Jorge Luis Borges

He [Omar Khayyam] is an atheist, but knows how to interpret in orthodox style the most difficult passages of the Koran; for every educated man is a theologian and faith is not a requisite. ~ Jorge Luis Borges

When a writer dies, he becomes his books. ~ Jorge Luis Borges

As 'Possession' progresses, it seems less and less like the usual satire about academia and more like something by Jorge Luis Borges. ~ Jay Parini

Why a should a dream be any less real than this table. Or Macbeth be less real than today's newspaper. ~ Jorge Luis Borges

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. ~ Jorge Luis Borges

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. ~ Jorge Luis Borges

Mirrors and copulation are abominable, since they both multiply the numbers of men ... ~ Jorge Luis Borges

Truly fine poetry must be read aloud. A good poem does not allow itself to be read in a low voice or silently. If we can read it silently, it is not a valid poem: a poem demands pronunciation. Poetry always remembers that it was an oral art before it was a written art. It remembers that it was first song. ~ Jorge Luis Borges

Soccer is popular because stupidity is popular. ~ Jorge Luis Borges

All language is a set of symbols whose use among its speakers assumes a share past ~ Jorge Luis Borges

This web of time–the strands of which approach one another, bifurcate, intersect or ignore each other through the centuries–embraces every possibility. We do not exist in most of them. In some you exist and not I, while in others I do, and you do not, and yet in others both of us exist. In this one, in which chance has favored me, you have come to my gate. In another, you, crossing the garden, have found me dead. In yet another, I say these very same words but am in error, a phantom Time is forever dividing itself toward innumerable futures."

from "Garden of Forking Paths ~ Jorge Luis Borges

He couldn't have known it, but among the original run of The History of Love, at least one copy was destined to change a life.

This particular book was one of the last of the two thousand to be printed, and sat for longer than the rest in a warehouse in the outskirts of Santiago, absorbing the humidity. From there it was finally sent to a bookstore in Buenos Aires. The careless owner hardly noticed it, and for some years it languished on the shelves, acquiring a pattern of mildew across the cover. It was a slim volume, and its position on the shelf wasn't exactly prime: crowded on the left by an overweight biography of a minor actress, and on the right by the once-bestselling novel of an author that everyone had since forgotten, it hardly left its spine visible to even the most rigorous browser. When the store changed owners it fell victim to a massive clearance, and was trucked off to another warehouse, foul, dingy, crawling with daddy longlegs, where it remained in the dark and damp before finally being sent to a small secondhand bookstore not far from the home of the writer Jorge Luis Borges.

The owner took her time unpacking the books she'd bought cheaply and in bulk from the warehouse. One morning, going through the boxes, she discovered the mildewed copy of The History of Love. She'd never heard of it, but the title caught her eye. She put it aside, and during a slow hour in the shop she read the opening chapter, called 'The Age of Silence.'
Nicole Krauss

It is worth remembering that every writer begins with a naively physical notion of what art is. A book for him or her is not an expression or a series of expressions, but literally a volume, a prism with six rectangular sides made of thin sheets of papers which should include a cover, an inside cover, an epigraph in italics, a preface, nine or ten parts with some verses at the beginning, a table of contents, an ex libris with an hourglass and a Latin phrase, a brief list of errata, some blank pages, a colophon and a publication notice: objects that are known to constitute the art of writing. ~ Jorge Luis Borges

Reality may avoid the obligation to be interesting, but ... hypotheses may not. ~ Jorge Luis Borges

The aesthetic event is something as evident, as immediate, as indefinable as love, the taste of fruit, as water. We feel poetry as we feel the closeness of a woman, or as we feel a mountain or a bay. If we feel it immediately, why dilute it further with words, which no doubt will be weaker than our feelings? ~ Jorge Luis Borges

My books standing there on the shelf do not know that I have written them. ~ Jorge Luis Borges

There is a line in Verlaine I shall not recall again,
There is a street close by forbidden to my feet,
There's a mirror that's seen me for the very last time,
There is a door that I have locked till the end of the world.
Among the books in my library (I have them before me)
There are some that I shall never open now.
This summer I complete my fiftieth year;
Death is gnawing at me ceaselessly. ~ Jorge Luis Borges

I saw a sunset in Queretaro that seemed to reflect the colour of a rose in Bengal. ~ Jorge Luis Borges

Reading ... is an activity subsequent to writing: more resigned, more civil, more intellectual. ~ Jorge Luis Borges

There is nothing very remarkable about
being immortal; with the exception of mankind,
all creatures are immortal, for they know
nothing of death. What is divine, terrible, and
incomprehensible is to know oneself immortal. ~ Jorge Luis Borges

Many people have thought of me as a thinker, as a philosopher, or even as a mystic. Well the truth is that though I have found reality perplexing enough - in fact, I find it gets more perplexing all the time - I never think of myself as a thinker. ~ Jorge Luis Borges

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

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

I forgot to say - a merely curious detail - that in one of the first chapters of Sartor Resartus, when speaking about garments, Carlyle says that the simplest garment he knows of was used by the cavalry of Bolivar in the South American war. And here we have a description of the poncho as "a blanket with a hole in the middle," under which he imagines Bolivar's cavalry soldier, he imagines him - simplifying it a bit - "mother naked," as naked as when he came out of his mother's belly, covered by the poncho, with only his sword and his spear."25 ~ Jorge Luis Borges

Emerson said that a library is a magic chamber in which there are many enchanted spirits. They wake when we call them. When the book lies unopened, it is literally, geometrically, a volume, a thing among things. When we open it, when the book surrenders itself to its reader, the aesthetic event occurs. And even for the same reader the same book changes, for the change; we are the river of Heraclitus, who said that the man of yesterday is not the man of today, who will not be the man of tomorrow. We change incessantly, and each reading of a book, each rereading, each memory of that rereading, reinvents the text. The text too is the changing river of Heraclitus. ~ Jorge Luis Borges

A writer's work is the product of laziness. ~ Jorge Luis Borges

When it was proclaimed that the Library contained all books, the first impression was one of extravagant happiness. All men felt themselves to be the masters of an intact and secret treasure. There was no personal or world problem whose eloquent solution did not exist in some hexagon. The universe was justified, the universe suddenly usurped the unlimited dimensions of hope. At that time a great deal was said about the Vindications: books of apology and prophecy which vindicated for all time the acts of every man in the universe and retained prodigious arcana for his future. Thousands of the greedy abandoned their sweet native hexagons and rushed up the stairways, urged on by the vain intention of finding their Vindication. These pilgrims disputed in the narrow corridors, proffered dark curses, strangled each other on the divine stairways, flung the deceptive books into the air shafts, met their death cast down in a similar fashion by the inhabitants of remote regions. Others went mad ... The Vindications exist (I have seen two which refer to persons of the future, to persons who are perhaps not imaginary) but the searchers did not remember that the possibility of a man's finding his Vindication, or some treacherous variation thereof, can be computed as zero. ~ Jorge Luis Borges

I had always thought of Paradise / In form and image as a library. ~ Jorge Luis Borges

Misery requires paradises lost ~ Jorge Luis Borges

I know very little of my own work by heart, because I don't like what I write. In fact, I find myself personally expressed far better in the writings of other poets than in my own, because I know all my mistakes - I know all the chinks and all the padding, I know that a particular line is weak, and so on. I read other poets in a different way; I don't look too closely at them. ~ Jorge Luis Borges

The morning sun was shone over the bronze blade. There were no more traces of blood left. "Would you believe it Ariadne?" said Theseus "The Minotaur almost didn't defended himself. ~ Jorge Luis Borges

The mind was dreaming. The world was its dream. ~ Jorge Luis Borges

The heresies we should fear are those which can be confused with orthodoxy. ~ Jorge Luis Borges

The exchange of thoughts is a condition necessary for all love, all friendship and all real dialogue. Two men who can speak together can enrich and broaden themselves indefinitely. ~ Jorge Luis Borges

Art is fire plus algebra. ~ Jorge Luis Borges

What will die with me when I die, what pathetic or fragile form will the world lose? ~ Jorge Luis Borges

The voice of the Lord answered from a whirlwind: "Neither am I anyone; I have dreamt the world as you dreamt your work, my Shakespeare, and among the forms in my dream are you, who like myself are many and no one. ~ Jorge Luis Borges

Taught by centuries of
living, the republic of immortal men had
achieved a perfection of tolerance, almost of
disdain. They knew that over an infinitely long span of time, all things happen to all men. As
reward for his past and future virtues, every
man merited every kindness - yet also every
betrayal, as reward for his past and future
iniquities. ~ Jorge Luis Borges

The task of art is to transform what is continuously happening to us, to transform all of these things into symbols, into music, into something which can last in man's memory. That is our duty. If we don't fulfill it, we feel unhappy. ~ Jorge Luis Borges

I think the first reading of a poem is a true one, and after that we delude ourselves into the belief that the sensation, the impression, is repeated. ~ Jorge Luis Borges

To speak is to fall into tautology. ~ Jorge Luis Borges

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. ~ Jorge Luis Borges

I have known uncertainty: a state unknown to the Greeks. ~ Jorge Luis Borges

I think that the reader should enrich what he is reading. He should misunderstand the text; he should change it into something else. ~ Jorge Luis Borges

The word happiness exists in every language; it is plausible the thing itself exists. ~ Jorge Luis Borges

There is a Hindu school of philosophy that says that we are not the actors in our lives, but rather the spectators, and this is illustrated using the metaphor of a dancer. These days, maybe it would be better to say an actor. A spectator sees a dancer or an actor, or, if you prefer, reads a novel, and ends up identifying with one of the characters who is there in front of him. This is what those Hindu thinkers before the fifth century said. And the same thing happens with us. I, for example, was born the same day as Jorge Luis Borges, exactly the same day. I have seen him be ridiculous in some situations, pathetic in others. And, as I have always had him in front of me, I have ended up identifying with him. ~ Jorge Luis Borges

I hardly know what I'm going to write - an article, a story, a poem in free verse - or in some regular form. I only know that when I have the first sentence. And when the first sentence makes a kind of pattern, then I find out the kind of rhythm I'm looking for. ~ Jorge Luis Borges

What will die with me the day I die? What pathetic or frail image will be lost to the world? The voice of Macedonio Fernandez, the image of a bay horse in a vacant lot on the corner of Sarrano and Charcas, a bar of sulfur in the drawer of a mahogany desk? ~ Jorge Luis Borges

Although I'm very lazy when it comes to writing, I'm not that lazy when it comes to thinking. I like to develop the plan of a short story, then cut it as short as possible, try to evolve all the necessary details. I know far more about the characters than what actually comes out of the writing. ~ Jorge Luis Borges

Such a pity that he [GK Chesterton] became a Catholic. ~ Jorge Luis Borges

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

This felicitous supposition declared that there is only one Individual, and that this indivisible Individual is every one of the separate beings in the universe, and that these beings are the instruments and masks of divinity itself. ~ Jorge Luis Borges

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. ~ Jorge Luis Borges

While we are asleep in this world, we are awake in another one ~ Jorge Luis Borges

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. ~ Jorge Luis Borges

A labyrinth of symbols ... An invisible labyrinth of time. ~ Jorge Luis Borges

Where are we, then, if not for paradise?" he asked. "Do you believe that the deity is able to create a place that is not paradise? Do you believe the Fall is something ther than not realizing that we are in paradise? ~ Jorge Luis Borges

Halfway through his reclusion, Arredondo experienced more than once that almost timeless time. In the first of the house's three patios there was cistern with a frog in it. It never occurred to Arredondo to think that the frog's time, which borders on eternity, was what he himself sought. ~ Jorge Luis Borges

From the twilight of day till the twilight of evening, a leopard, in the last years of the thirteenth century, would see some wooden planks, some vertical iron bars, men and women who changed, a wall and perhaps a stone gutter filled with dry leaves. He did not know, could not know, that he longed for love and cruelty and the hot pleasure of tearing things to pieces and the wind carrying the scent of a deer, but something suffocated and rebelled within him and God spoke to him in a dream: "You live and will die in this prison so that a man I know of may see you a certain number of times and not forget you and place your figure and symbol in a poem which has its precise place in the scheme of the universe. You suffer captivity, but you will have given a word to the poem." God, in the dream, illumined the animal's brutishness and the animal understood these reasons and accepted his destiny, but, when he awoke, there was in him only an obscure resignation, a valorous ignorance, for the machinery of the world is much too complex for the simplicity of a beast. ~ Jorge Luis Borges

The Falklands thing was a fight between two bald men over a comb. ~ Jorge Luis Borges

In death we shall rediscover all the instants of our life and we shall freely combine them as in dreams. ~ Jorge Luis Borges

The taste of the apple ... lies in the contact of the fruit with the palate, not in the fruit itself; in a similar way ... poetry lies in the meeting of poem and reader, not in the lines of symbols printed on the pages of a book. What is essential is the aesthetic act, the thrill, the almost physical emotion that comes with each reading. ~ Jorge Luis Borges

No one is a poet from eight to twelve and from two to six. Whoever is a poet is one always, and continually assaulted by poetry. ~ Jorge Luis Borges

The three of them knew it. She was Kafka's mistress. Kafka had dreamt her. The three of them knew it. He was Kafka's friend. Kafka had dreamt him. The three of them knew it. The woman said to the friend, Tonight I want you to have me. The three of them knew it. The man replied: If we sin, Kafka will stop dreaming us. One of them knew it. There was no longer anyone on earth. Kafka said to himself Now the two of them have gone, I'm left alone. I'll stop dreaming myself. ~ Jorge Luis Borges

Happy are the beloved and the lovers and those who can live without love. ~ Jorge Luis Borges

It may be that universal history is the history of the different intonations given a handful of metaphors. ~ Jorge Luis Borges

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

Israelites, Christians and Muslims profess immortality, but the veneration they render this world proves they believe only in it, since they destine all other worlds, in infinite number, to be its reward or punishment. ~ Jorge Luis Borges

Time is the tiger that devours me, but I am that tiger. ~ Jorge Luis Borges

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

Hell had become, over the years, a wearisome speculation. Even its proselytizers have neglected it, abandoning the poor, but serviceable, human allusion which the ecclesiastic fires of the Holy Office once had in this world: a temporal torment, of course, but one that was not unworthy, within its terrestrial limitations, of being a metaphor for the immortal, for the perfect pain without destruction that the objects of divine wrath will forever endure. Whether or not this hypothesis is satisfactoy, an increasing lassitude in the propaganda of the institution is indisputable. (Do not be alarmed; I use propaganda here not in its commercial but rather in its Catholic genealogy: a congregation of cardinals.) ~ Jorge Luis Borges

Perhaps a feature of the crucified face lurks in every mirror; perhaps the face died, was erased, so that God may be all of us. Who knows but that tonight we may see it in the labyrinth of dreams, and tomorrow not know we saw it. ~ Jorge Luis Borges

We are like the wizard who weaves a labyrinth and is forced to wander through it till the end of his days ~ Jorge Luis Borges

Truth never penetrates an unwilling mind. ~ Jorge Luis Borges

Every man should be capable of all ideas, and I believe that in the future he will be. ~ Jorge Luis Borges

As I think of the many myths, there is one that is very harmful, and that is the myth of countries. I mean, why should I think of myself as being an Argentine, and not a Chilean, and not an Uruguayan.

I don't know really.

All of those myths that we impose on ourselves - and they make for hatred, for war, for enmity - are very harmful.

Well, I suppose in the long run, governments and countries will die out and we'll be just, well, cosmopolitans. ~ Jorge Luis Borges

It is a fact, indeed, that most of
the great teachers of mankind have been not writers
but speakers. Think of Pythagoras, Christ, Socrates,
the Buddha, and so on. And since I have spoken of
Socrates, I would like to say something about Plato. I
remember Bernard Shaw said that Plato was the dramatist
who invented Socrates ~ Jorge Luis Borges

We (the indivisible divinity that works in us) have dreamed the world. We have dreamed it resistant, mysterious, visible, ubiquitous in space and firm in time, but we have allowed slight, and eternal, bits of the irrational to form part of its architecture so as to know that it is false. ~ Jorge Luis Borges

The man who acquires an encyclopedia does not thereby acquire every line, every paragraph, every page, and every illustration; he acquires the possibility of becoming familiar with one and another of those things. ~ Jorge Luis Borges

The original is unfaithful to the translation. ~ Jorge Luis Borges