Jorge Luis Borges Quotes

240 Sourced Quotes

Whatever one man does, it is as if all men did it. For that reason, it is not unfair that one disobedience in a garden should contaminate all humanity; for that reason it is not unjust that the crucifixion of a single Jew should be sufficient to save it.

Jorge Luis Borges
Films are even stranger, for what we are seeing are not disguised people but photographs of disguised people, and yet we believe them while the film is being shown.

Jorge Luis Borges
The earth we inhabit is an error, an incompetent parody. Mirrors and paternity are abominable because they multiply and affirm it.

Jorge Luis Borges
In all the world, one man has been born, one man has died.

Jorge Luis Borges
One of the heresiarchs of Uqbar had stated that mirrors and copulation are abominable, since they both multiply the numbers of man.

Jorge Luis Borges
We accept reality so readily - perhaps because we sense that nothing is real.

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

Jorge Luis Borges
I will pause to consider this eternity from which the subsequent ones derive.

Jorge Luis Borges
I leave to the various futures (not to all) my garden of forking paths.

Jorge Luis Borges
I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities that I have visited, all my ancestors.

Jorge Luis Borges
I walk slowly, like one who comes from so far away he doesn't expect to arrive

Jorge Luis Borges
I have always imagined Paradise as a kind of library.

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 foresee that man will resign himself each day to new abominations, and soon that only bandits and soldiers will be left.

Jorge Luis Borges
A writer should have another lifetime to see if he's appreciated.

Jorge Luis Borges
It would be exaggerating to say that our relationship is hostile; I live, I let myself live, so that Borges can weave his literature and that literature justifies me.... I don't know which of us is writing this page.

Jorge Luis Borges
His many years had reduced and polished him the way water smooths and polishes a stone or generations of men polish a proverb.

Jorge Luis Borges
A man gradually identifies himself with the form of his fate; a man is, in the long run, his own circumstances.

Jorge Luis Borges
We (the indivisible divinity that works in us) have dreamed the world. We have dreamed it resistant, mysterious, visible, ubiquitous in space and firm in time, but we have allowed slight, and eternal, bits of the irrational to form part of its architecture so as to know that it is false.

Jorge Luis Borges
Do you want to see what human eyes have never seen? Look at the moon. Do you want to hear what ears have never heard? Listen to the bird's cry. Do you want to touch what hands have never touched? Touch the earth. Verily I say that God is about to create the world.

Jorge Luis Borges
What one man does is something done, in some measure, by all men. For that reason a disobedience committed in a garden contaminates the human race; for that reason it is not unjust that the crucifixion of a single Jew suffices to save it.

Jorge Luis Borges
Your unforgivable sins do not allow you to see my splendor.

Jorge Luis Borges
For one of those gnostics, the visible universe was an illusion or, more precisely, a sophism. Mirrors and fatherhood are abominable because they multiply it and extend it.

Jorge Luis Borges
I come from a vertiginous country where the lottery forms a principal part of reality.

Jorge Luis Borges
There is a concept which corrupts and upsets all others. I refer not to Evil, whose limited realm is that of ethics; I refer to the infinite.

Jorge Luis Borges
Thus my life is a flight and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to him.

Jorge Luis Borges
I saw the delicate bone structure of a hand; I saw the survivors of a battle sending out post cards... I saw the oblique shadow of some ferns on the floor of a hot-house; I saw tigers, emboli, bison, ground swells and armies; I saw all the ants in the world.

Jorge Luis Borges
The central problem of novel-writing is causality.

Jorge Luis Borges
A book is a physical object in a world of physical objects. It is a set of dead symbols. And then the right reader comes along, and the words—or rather the poetry behind the words, for the words themselves are mere symbols—spring to life, and we have a resurrection of the word.

Jorge Luis Borges
A man sets himself the task of portraying the world. Shortly before he dies he discovers that this patient labyrinth of lines is a drawing of his own face.

Jorge Luis Borges