Jorge Luis Borges 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.

~ Jorge Luis Borges

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

~ Jorge Luis Borges

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.

~ Jorge Luis Borges

The truth is that we all live by leaving behind, no doubt we all profoundly know that we are immortal and that sooner or later every man will do all things and know everything.

~ Jorge Luis Borges

From my weakness, I drew strength that never left me.

~ Jorge Luis Borges

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

~ 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

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

~ Jorge Luis Borges

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

~ Jorge Luis Borges

And so, as I sleep, some dream beguiles me, and suddenly I know I dream.Then I think: this is a dream, a pure diversion of my will; now that I have unlimited power, I am going to create a tiger.Oh incompetence! Never do my dreams engender the wild beast I longed for.The tiger indeed appears, but stuffed or flimsy, or with impure variations of shape, or of an implausible size, or all too fleeting, or with a touch of the dog or bird.

~ Jorge Luis Borges

One of the schools of Tlön goes so far as to negate time; it reasons that the present is indefinite, that the future has no reality other than as a present hope, that the past has no reality other than as a present memory. Another school declares that all time has already transpired and that our life is only the crepuscular and no doubt falsified an 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 and that only what happens every three hundred nights is true. Another, that while we sleep here, we are awake elsewhere and that in this way every man is two men.

~ Jorge Luis Borges

The future is inevitable and precise, but it may not occur. God lurks in the gaps.

~ Jorge Luis Borges

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

~ Jorge Luis Borges

Literature is not exhaustible, for the sufficient and simple reason that a single book is not.

~ Jorge Luis Borges

I kept asking myself how a book could be infinite. I could not imagine any other than a cyclic volume, circular. A volume whose last page would be the same as the first and so have the possibility of continuing indefinitely.

~ Jorge Luis Borges

In all fiction, when a man is faced with alternatives he chooses one at the expense of the others. In the almost unfathomable Ts'ui Pen, he chooses – simultaneously – all of them. He thus creates various futures, various times which start others that will in their turn branch out and bifurcate in other times. That is the cause of the contradictions in the novel.

~ Jorge Luis Borges

I reread these negative remarks and realize that I do not know whether music can despair of music or marble of marble. I do know that literature is an art that can foresee the time when it will be silenced, an art that can become inflamed with its own virtue, fall in love with its own decline, and court its own demise.

~ 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

The metaphysicians of Tlön are not looking for truth, nor even for an approximation of it; they are after a kind of amazement.

~ 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

We are ignorant of the meaning of the dragon in the same way that we are ignorant of the meaning of the universe; but there is something in the dragon’s image that fits man’s imagination, and this accounts for the dragon’s appearance in different places and periods.

~ Jorge Luis Borges

All theories are legitimate, no matter. What matters is what you do with them.

~ Jorge Luis Borges

I imagined a labyrinth of labyrinths, a maze of mazes, a twisting, turning, ever-widening labyrinth that contained both past and future and somehow implied the stars. Absorbed in those illusory imaginings, I forgot that I was a pursued man; I felt myself, for an indefinite while, the abstract perceiver of the world. The vague, living countryside, the moon, the remains of the day did their work in me; so did the gently downward road, which forestalled all possibility of weariness. The evening was near, yet infinite.

~ 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

One day or one night—between my days and nights, what difference can there be?—I dreamed that there was a grain of sand on the floor of my cell. Unconcerned, I went back to sleep; I dreamed that I woke up and there were two grains of sand. Again I slept; I dreamed that now there were three. Thus the grains of sand multiplied, little by little, until they filled the cell and I was dying beneath that hemisphere of sand. I realized that I was dreaming; with a vast effort I woke myself. But waking up was useless—I was suffocated by the countless sand. Someone said to me:You have wakened not out of sleep, but into a prior dream, and that dream lies within another, and so on, to infinity, which is the number of the grains of sand. The path that you are to take is endless, and you will die before you have truly awakened.I felt lost. The sand crushed my mouth, but I cried out: I cannot be killed by sand that I dream —nor is there any such thing as a dream within a dream.— Jorge Luis Borges, The Writing of the God

~ Jorge Luis Borges

Man's memory shapesIts own Eden within

~ Jorge Luis Borges

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

~ Jorge Luis Borges

We have a very precise image - an image at times shameless - of what we have lost, but we are ignorant of what may follow or replace it.

~ Jorge Luis Borges

I'm alone and nobody is in the mirror

~ Jorge Luis Borges

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

~ Jorge Luis Borges

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

~ Jorge Luis Borges

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.

~ Jorge Luis Borges

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

~ Jorge Luis Borges

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

~ Jorge Luis Borges

It seemed incredible that this day, a day without warnings or omens, might be that of my implacable death.

~ Jorge Luis Borges

God, in the dream, illumined the animal's brutishness and he understood the reasons, and accepted his destiny; but when he awoke there was only a dark resignation, a valiant ignorance, for the machinery of the world is far too complex for the simplicity of a wild beast.Years later, Dante was dying in Ravenna, as unjustified and as lonely as any other man. In a dream, God declared to him the secret purpose of his life and work; Dante, in wonderment, knew at last who and what he was and blessed the bitterness of his life....upon waking, he felt that he had received and lost an infinite thing, something that he would not be able to recuperate or even glimpse, for the machinery of the world is much too complex for the simplicity of a man.

~ Jorge Luis Borges

The library will endure; it is the universe. As for us, everything has not been written; we are not turning into phantoms. We walk the corridors, searching the shelves and rearranging them, looking for lines of meaning amid leagues of cacophony and incoherence, reading the history of the past and our future, collecting our thoughts and collecting the thoughts of others, and every so often glimpsing mirrors, in which we may recognize creatures of the information.

~ Jorge Luis Borges

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

~ Jorge Luis Borges

I cannot combine some charactersdhcmrlchtdjwhich the divine Library has not foreseen and which in one of its secret tongues do not contain a terrible meaning. No one can articulate a syllable which is not filled with tenderness and fear, which is not, in one of these languages, the powerful name of a god. To speak is to fall into tautology.

~ Jorge Luis Borges

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

~ Jorge Luis Borges