Jorge Luis Borges Quotes

240 Sourced Quotes

I don't think there's any essential difference, at least for me, between writing poetry and writing prose.

Jorge Luis Borges
I try to avoid purple patches, fine writing, all that kind of thing... because I think they're a mistake. And then sometimes it comes through and sometimes it doesn't, but that's not up to me. It's up to chance.

Jorge Luis Borges
I don't think I can really believe in doomsday; I could hardly believe in rewards and punishments, in heaven or hell. As I wrote down in one of my sonnets - I seem to be always plagiarizing, imitating myself or somebody else for that matter - I think I am quite unworthy of heaven or of hell, and even of immortality.

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

Jorge Luis Borges
No one is a poet from eight to twelve and from two to six. Whoever is a poet is one always, and continually assaulted by poetry.

Jorge Luis Borges
Art is very mysterious. I wonder if you can really do any damage to art. I think that when we're writing, something comes through or should come through, in spite of our theories. So theories are not really important.

Jorge Luis Borges
In our dreams (writes Coleridge) images represent the sensations we think they cause; we do not feel horror because we are threatened by a sphinx; we dream of a sphinx in order to explain the horror we feel.

Jorge Luis Borges
People think that I've committed myself to idealism, to solipsism, or to doctrines of the cabala, because I've used them in my tales. But really I was only trying to see what could be done with them. On the other hand, it might be argued that if I use them it's because I was feeling an affinity to them. Of course, that's true.

Jorge Luis Borges
Islam asserts that on the unappealable Day of Judgment every perpetrator of the image of a living creature will be raised from the dead with his works, and he will be commanded to bring them to life, and he will fail, and be cast out with them into the fires of punishment.

Jorge Luis Borges
In fact I'm in too much of a mental muddle to know where I am - an idealist or not. I'm a mere man of letters, and I do what I can with those subjects.

Jorge Luis Borges
I hardly know what I'm going to write - an article, a story, a poem in free verse - or in some regular form. I only know that when I have the first sentence. And when the first sentence makes a kind of pattern, then I find out the kind of rhythm I'm looking for.

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

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

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

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 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
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 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
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 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