Jorge Luis Borges Quotes

So plant your own gardens and decorate your own soul, instead of waiting for someone to bring you flowers.

Poets, like the blind, can see in the dark.

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.

We did meet forty years ago. At that time we were both influenced by Whitman and I said, jokingly in part, 'I don't think anything can be done in Spanish, do you?' Neruda agreed, but we decided it was too late for us to write our verse in English. We'd have to make the best of a second-rate literature.

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.

Death is just infinity closing in.

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

La duda es uno de los nombres de la inteligencia.

I can’t talk about my books. I have written them and tried to forget them. I have written once, and readers have read me many times, no? I try to think of what I wrote, it’s very unhealthy to think about the past, the case of elegies is very sad, as much as the case of complaints.

I came to the idea of how fine it would be to think of an encyclopedia of an actual world, and then of an encyclopedia, a very rigorous one of course, of an imaginary world, where everything should be linked.

I know of a wild region whose librarians repudiate the vain superstitious custom of seeking any sense in books and compare it to looking for meaning in dreams or in the chaotic lines of one's hands . . . They admit that the inventors of writing imitated the twenty-five natural symbols, but they maintain that this application is accidental and that books in themselves mean nothing. This opinion - we shall see - is not altogether false.

The things that are said in literature are always the same. What is important is the way they are said. Looking for metaphors, for example: When I was a young man I was always hunting for new metaphors. Then I found out that really good metaphors are always the same.

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

I never reread what I've written. I'm far too afraid to feel ashamed of what I've done.

Do you want to see what human eyes have never seen? Look at the moon. Do you want to hear what ears have never heard? Listen to the bird's cry. Do you want to touch what hands have never touched? Touch the earth. Verily I say that God is about to create the world.

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.

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

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

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.

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

Every novel is an ideal plane inserted into the realm of reality.

There are no moral or intellectual merits. Homer composed the Odyssey; if we postulate an infinite period of time, with infinite circumstances and changes, the impossible thing is not to compose the Odyssey, at least once.

In the critic's vocabulary, the word "precursor" is indispensable, but it should be cleansed of all connotations of polemic or rivalry. The fact is that every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future." -- Essay: "Kafka and his Precursors

Art is very mysterious. I wonder if you can really do any damage to art. I think that when we're writing, something comes through or should come through, in spite of our theories. So theories are not really important.

I know that when I think of myself as being utterly worn out, when I think that somehow I have nothing more to write, then something is happening within me. And, in due course, it bubbles up; it comes to the surface, and then I do my best to listen. But there's nothing mystical about all this. I suppose all writers do the same.

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

i walk slowly, like one who comes from so far away he doesn't expect to arrive

When I wake up, I wake to something worse. It’s the astonishment of being myself

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

All writing is dreaming

Each thing implies the universe.

The future has no other reality than as present hope, and the past is no more than present memory.

We are our memory, we are that chimerical museum of shifting shapes, that pile of broken mirrors.

I have always come to life after coming to books.

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?

If space is infinite, we may be at any point in space. If time is infinite, we may be at any point in time.

Happy are the beloved and the lovers and those who can live without love.

Let others pride themselves about how many pages they have written; I'd rather boast about the ones I've read.

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

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.

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.

Art is endless like a river flowing, passing, yet remaining.

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

I confess that I have not cleared a path through all seven hundred pages, I confess to having examined only bits and pieces, and yet I know what it is, with that bold and legitimate certainty with which we assert our knowledge of a city, without ever having been rewarded with the intimacy of all the many streets it includes.

Then I reflect that all things happen, happen to one, precisely now. Century follows century, and things happen only in the present. There are countless men in the air, on land and at sea, and all that really happens happens to me.

It only takes two facing mirrors to build a labyrinth.

Writing is nothing more than a guided dream.

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