Jorge Luis Borges Quotes

240 Sourced Quotes

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.

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

Jorge Luis Borges
To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god.

Jorge Luis Borges
Like all writers, he measured the achievements of others by what they had accomplished, asking of them that they measure him by what he envisaged or planned.

Jorge Luis Borges
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.

Jorge Luis Borges
I would define the baroque as that style that deliberately exhausts (or tries to exhaust) its own possibilities, and that borders on self-caricature. [...] The baroque is the final stage in all art, when art flaunts and squanders its resources.

Jorge Luis Borges
The European and the North American consider that a book that has been awarded any kind of prize must be good; the Argentine allows for the possibility that the book might not be bad, despite the prize.

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

Jorge Luis Borges
A writer, or any man, must believe that whatever happens to him is an instrument; everything has been given for an end. This is even stronger in the case of the artist. Everything that happens, including humiliations, embarrassments, misfortunes, all has been given like clay, like material for one's art. One must accept it.

Jorge Luis Borges
The geometry of Tlön comprises two somewhat different disciplines: the visual and the tactile. The latter corresponds to our own geometry and is subordinated to the first.

Jorge Luis Borges
Writing is nothing more than a guided dream.

Jorge Luis Borges
I thought of a labyrinth of labyrinths, of one sinuous spreading labyrinth that would encompass the past and the future and in some way involve the stars.

Jorge Luis Borges
Coleridge observes that all men are born Aristotelians or Platonists. The latter feel that classes, orders, and genres are realities; the former, that they are generalizations. For the latter, language is nothing but an approximative set of symbols; for the former, it is the map of the universe. The Platonist knows that the universe is somehow a cosmos, an order; that order, for the Aristotelian, can be an error or a fiction of our partial knowledge. Across the latitudes and the epochs, the two immortal antagonists change their name and language: one is Parmenides, Plato, Spinoza, Kant, Francis Bradley; the other, Heraclitus, Aristotle, Locke, Hume, William James.

Jorge Luis Borges
If the pages of this book contain some successful verse, the reader must excuse me the discourtesy of having usurped it first. Our nothingness differs little; it is a trivial and chance circumstance that you should be the reader of these exercises and I their author.

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

Jorge Luis Borges
Captivated by its discipline, humanity forgets and goes on forgetting that it is the discipline of chess players, not of angels.

Jorge Luis Borges
Villari took no notice of them because the idea of a coincidence between art and reality was alien to him. Unlike people who read novels, he never saw himself as a character in a work of art.

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
Ts'ui Pe must have said once: I am withdrawing to write a book. And another time: I am withdrawing to construct a labyrinth. Every one imagined two works; to no one did it occur that the book and the maze were one and the same thing.

Jorge Luis Borges
Beyond my anxiety, beyond this writing,
the universe waits, inexhaustible, inviting.

Jorge Luis Borges
The aesthetic event is something as evident, as immediate, as indefinable as love, the taste of fruit, of 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 with other words, which no doubt will be weaker than our feelings?

Jorge Luis Borges
It means much to have loved, to have been happy, to have laid my hand on the living Garden, even for a day.

Jorge Luis Borges
It seemed incredible to me that day without premonitions or symbols should be the one of my inexorable death.

Jorge Luis Borges
My advanced age has taught me the resignation of being Borges.

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