Jorge Luis Borges Quotes

240 Sourced Quotes

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

Jorge Luis Borges
I think of reading a book as no less an experience than travelling or falling in love.

Jorge Luis Borges
In my life I have received many unmerited honors, but there is one which has made me happier than all the others: the director of the National Library [of Mexico].

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

Jorge Luis Borges
Art always opts for the individual, the concrete; art is not Platonic.

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

Jorge Luis Borges
The impossibility of penetrating the divine pattern of the universe cannot stop us from planning human patterns, even though we are conscious they are not definitive. The analytic language of Wilkins is not the least admirable of such patterns.

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
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
I, who have been so many men in vain, want to be one man, myself alone. From out of a whirlwind the voice of God replied: I am not, either. I dreamed the world the way you dreamed your work, my Shakespeare: one of the forms of my dream was you, who, like me, are many and one.

Jorge Luis Borges
Then he reflected that reality does not usually coincide with our anticipation of it; with a logic of his own he inferred that to forsee a circumstantial detail is to prevent its happening. Trusting in this weak magic, he invented, so that they would not happen, the most gruesome details.

Jorge Luis Borges
Patio, heaven's watercourse.
The patio is the slope
down which the sky flows into the house.
Serenely
eternity waits at the crossway of the stars.

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
The certainty that everything has already been written annuls us, or renders us phantasmal.

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
I cannot walk through the suburbs in the solitude of the night without thinking that the night pleases us because it suppresses idle details, just as our memory does.

Jorge Luis Borges
I secretly assumed, as poets do,
The duty on me to define the moon.

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

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
When I feel I'm going to write something, then I just am quiet and I try to listen. Then something comes through. And I do what I can in order not to tamper with it.

Jorge Luis Borges
The first thing a young writer sets out to do is to show his readers that he possesses a dictionary.

Jorge Luis Borges
It is venturesome to think that a coordination of words (philosophies are nothing more than that) can resemble the universe very much. It is also venturesome to think that of all these illustrious coordinations, one of them — at least in an infinitesimal way — does not resemble the universe a bit more than the others.

Jorge Luis Borges
Years of solitude had taught him that, in one's memory, all days tend to be the same, but that there is not a day, not even in jail or in the hospital, which does not bring surprises, which is not a translucent network of minimal surprises.

Jorge Luis Borges
To arrange a library is to practice in a quiet and modest way the art of criticism.

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

Jorge Luis Borges