Jorge Luis Borges Quotes - Page 2

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

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

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

I've fixed my feelings into durable wordswhen they could have been spent on tenderness

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

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

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

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 do not know whether music knows how to despair over music, or marble over marble, but literature is an art which knows how to prophesize the time in which it might have fallen silent, how to attack its own virtue, and how to fall in love with its own dissolution and court its own end.

Jorge Luis Borges

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

Jorge Luis Borges

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

Jorge Luis Borges

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

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

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

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

Jorge Luis Borges

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

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

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

Jorge Luis Borges

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

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

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

Jorge Luis Borges

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

Reality is not always probable, or likely.

Jorge Luis Borges

We are as ignorant of the meaning of the dragon as we are of the meaning of the universe.

Jorge Luis Borges

Tearing money is an impiety, like throwing away bread.

Jorge Luis Borges

There is an hour of the afternoon when the plain is on the verge of saying something. It never says, or perhaps it says it infinitely, or perhaps we do not understand it, or we understand it and it is untranslatable as music.

Jorge Luis Borges

Historical truth, for him, is not what has happened; it is what we judge to have happened.

Jorge Luis Borges

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

Jorge Luis Borges

In my soul the afternoon grows wider and I reflect.

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

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

It must be that I am not made to be a dead man, but these places and this discussion seem like a dream, and not a dream dreamed by me but by someone else still to be born.

Jorge Luis Borges

My father and he had cemented (the verb is excessive) one of those English friendships which begin by avoiding intimacies and eventually eliminate speech altogether. They used to exchange books and periodicals; they would beat one another at chess, without saying a word.

Jorge Luis Borges

The gods weave misfortunes for men, so that the generations to come will have something to sing about.” Mallarmé repeats, less beautifully, what Homer said; “tout aboutit en un livre,” everything ends up in a book. The Greeks speak of generations that will sing; Mallarmé speaks of an object, of a thing among things, a book. But the idea is the same; the idea that we are made for art, we are made for memory, we are made for poetry, or perhaps we are made for oblivion. But something remains, and that something is history or poetry, which are not essentially different.

Jorge Luis Borges

Leaving behind the babble of the plaza, I enter the Library. I feel, almost physically, the gravitation of the books, the enveloping serenity of order, time magically dessicated and preserved.

Jorge Luis Borges

Of all man’s instruments, the most wondrous, no doubt, is the book. The other instruments are extensions of his body. The microscope, the telescope, are extensions of his sight; the telephone is the extension of his voice; then we have the plow and the sword, extensions of the arm. But the book is something else altogether: the book is an extension of memory and imagination.

Jorge Luis Borges

Paradise will be a kind of library

Jorge Luis Borges

A book is more than a verbal structure or series of verbal structures; it is the dialogue it establishes with its reader and the intonation it imposes upon his voice and the changing and durable images it leaves in his memory. A book is not an isolated being: it is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships.

Jorge Luis Borges

When writers die they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarna

Jorge Luis Borges

Personally, I am a hedonistic reader; I have never read a book merely because it was ancient. I read books for the aesthetic emotions they offer me, and I ignore the commentaries and criticism.

Jorge Luis Borges

I cannot sleep unless I am surrounded by books.

Jorge Luis Borges

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

Jorge Luis Borges

There are official searchers, inquisitors. I have seen them in the performance of their function: they always arrive extremely tired from their journeys; they speak of a broken stairway which almost killed them; they talk with the librarian of galleries and stairs; sometimes they pick up the nearest volume and leaf through it, looking for infamous words. Obviously, no one expects to discover anything.

Jorge Luis Borges

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

Jorge Luis Borges

It was under English trees that I meditated on that lost labyrinth: I pictured it perfect and inviolate on the secret summit of a mountain; I pictured its outlines blurred by rice paddies, or underwater; I pictured it as infinite—a labyrinth not of octagonal pavillions and paths that turn back upon themselves, but of rivers and provinces and kingdoms....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

One of the schools in Tlön has reached the point of denying time. It reasons that the present is undefined, that the future has no other reality than as present hope, that the past is no more than present memory.

Jorge Luis Borges

And yet, and yet… Denying temporal succession, denying the self, denying the astronomical universe, are apparent desperations and secret consolations. Our destiny … is not frightful by being unreal; it is frightful because it is irreversible and iron-clad. 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. The world, unfortunately, is real; I, unfortunately, am Borges.

Jorge Luis Borges

The thought came over me that never would one full and absolute moment, containing all the others, justify my life, that all of my instants would be provisional phases, annihilators of the past turned to face the future, and that beyond the episodic, the present, the circumstantial, we were nobody.

Jorge Luis Borges

I prayed aloud, less to plead for divine favor than to intimidate the tribe with articulate speech.

Jorge Luis Borges

He was very religious he believed that he had a secret pact with God which exempted him from doing good in exchange for prayers and piety.

Jorge Luis Borges

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

Jorge Luis Borges

The famed author Robert Lewis Stevenson declared that he'd trained his Brownies to be writers. As he slept, they would whisper fantastic plots in his ear -- for example, the strange case of Dr. Jekyll and the diabolical Mr. Hyde, and that episode in "Olalla" when a young man from an old Spanish family bites his sister's hand.

Jorge Luis Borges

How can we manage to illuminate the pathos of our lives?

Jorge Luis Borges

A writer always begins by being too complicated—he’s playing at several games at once.

Jorge Luis Borges

I...have always known that my destiny was, above all, a literary destiny — that bad things and some good things would happen to me, but that, in the long run, all of it would be convertedinto words. Particularly the bad things, since happiness does not need to be transformed: happiness is its own end.

Jorge Luis Borges

He thought that the rose was to be found in its own eternity and not in his words; and that we may mention or allude to a thing, but not express it.

Jorge Luis Borges

A writer - and, I believe, generally all persons - must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.

Jorge Luis Borges

Sometimes, looking at the many books I have at home, I feel I shall die before I come to the end of them, yet I cannot resist the temptation of buying new books. Whenever I walk into a bookstore and find a book on one of my hobbies — for example, Old English or Old Norse poetry — I say to myself, “What a pity I can’t buy that book, for I already have a copy at home.

Jorge Luis Borges

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