Jorge Luis Borges - Life Quotes

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It is known that Whistler when asked how long it took him to paint one of his "nocturnes" answered: "All of my life." With the same rigor he could have said that all of the centuries that preceded the moment when he painted were necessary. From that correct application of the law of causality it follows that the slightest event presupposes the inconceivable universe and, conversely, that the universe needs even the slightest of events.

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
We all think that fate has dealt us a wretched sort of lot in life, and that others must be better. [...] I presume that in the heaven of the Blessèd there are those who believe that the advantages of that locale are much exaggerated by theologists, who have never been there themselves.

Jorge Luis Borges
The central fact of my life has been the existence of words and the possibility of weaving those words into poetry.

Jorge Luis Borges
Any life, however long and complicated it may be, actually consists of a single moment — the moment when a man knows forever more who he is.

Jorge Luis Borges
In life, he suffered from a sense of unreality, as do many Englishmen.

Jorge Luis Borges
His life, measured in space and time, will take up a mere few lines, which my ignorance will abbreviate further.

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

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
In the course of a life devoted less to living than to reading, I have verified many times that literary intentions and theories are nothing more than stimuli and that the final work usually ignores or even contradicts them.

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
Any life, no matter how long or complex it may be, is made up essentially of a single moment—the moment in which a man finds out, once and for all, who he is.

Jorge Luis Borges
The thought came over me that never would one full and absolute moment, containing all the others, justify my life, that all of my instants would be provisional phases, annihilators of the past turned to face the future, and that beyond the episodic, the present, the circumstantial, we were nobody.

Jorge Luis Borges
Imprecision is tolerable and verisimilar in literature, because we always tend towards it in life.

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
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