Jorge Luis Borges Quotes

240 Sourced Quotes

I suppose identity depends on memory. And if my memory is blotted out, then I wonder if I exist - I mean, if I am the same person. Of course, I don't have to solve that problem. It's up to God, if any.

Jorge Luis Borges
I'm not interested in the fact that a writer may label himself as being intellectual or anti-intellectual. l'm really interested in the stuff he's turning out.

Jorge Luis Borges
Lully's machine, Mill's fear and Lasswitz's chaotic library can be the subject of jokes, but they exaggerate a propensity which is common: making metaphysics and the arts into a kind of play with combinations.

Jorge Luis Borges
I write for myself, and perhaps for half a dozen friends. And that should be enough. And that might improve the quality of my writing. But if I were writing for thousands of people, then I would write what might please them. And as I know nothing about them, and maybe I'd have a rather low opinion of them, I don't think that would do any good to my work.

Jorge Luis Borges
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.

Jorge Luis Borges
I think it's all to the good that a writer shouldn't be too famous. Because, in a country where a writer may be famous, he may be pandering to the mob, celebrity and so on.

Jorge Luis Borges
As a boy, I used to marvel that the letters in a closed book did not get scrambled and lost overnight.

Jorge Luis Borges
I might accept immortality, if I had to do it. But I would prefer - if there is any afterlife - to know nothing whatever about Borges, about his experiences in this world.

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
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.

Jorge Luis Borges
The man who has learned that three plus one are four doesn't have to go through a proof of that assertion with coins, or dice, or chess pieces, or pencils. He knows it, and that's that. He cannot conceive a different sum. There are mathematicians who say that three plus one is a tautology for four, a different way of saying "four"... If three plus one can be two, or fourteen, then reason is madness.

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

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

Jorge Luis Borges
Blindness has not been for me a total misfortune; it should not be seen in a pathetic way. It should be seen as a way of life: one of the styles of living.

Jorge Luis Borges
You boil it in saw dust: you salt it in glue: You condense it with locust and tape: Still keeping one principle object in view - To preserve its symmetrical shape.

Jorge Luis Borges
You may win your heart's desire, but in the end you're cheated of it by death.

Jorge Luis Borges
I have tried (I am not sure how successfully) to write plain tales. I dare not say they are simple; there is not a simple page, a simple word, on earth - - for all pages, all words, predicate the universe, whose most notorious attribute is its complexity.

Jorge Luis Borges
I am almost sure to be blotted out by death, but sometimes I think it is not impossible that I may continue to live in some other manner after my physical death. Or, as Hamlet wonders, what dreams will come when we leave this body?

Jorge Luis Borges
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.

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
On some shelf in some hexagon, it was argued, there must exist a book that is the cipher and perfect compendium of all other books, and some librarian must have examined that book; this librarian is analogous to a god.

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
Poetry springs from something deeper; it's beyond intelligence.

Jorge Luis Borges
My friends tell me that I am an intruder, that I don't really write when I attempt poetry. But those of my friends who write in prose say that I'm no writer when I attempt prose. So really I don't know what to do, I'm in a quandary.

Jorge Luis Borges
I have preferred to teach my students not English literature but my love for certain authors, or, even better, certain pages, or even better than that, certain lines. One falls in love with a line, then with a page, then with an author. Well, why not? It is a beautiful process.

Jorge Luis Borges