Jorge Luis Borges Quotes

So plant your own gardens and decorate your own soul, instead of waiting for someone to bring you flowers.

Being with you and not being with you is the only way I have to measure time.

Don't talk unless you can improve the silence.

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 I have visited.

I cannot sleep unless I am surrounded by books.

The worst labyrinth is not that intricate form that can entrap us forever, but a single and precise straight line

The fact is that poetry is not the books in the library . . . Poetry is the encounter of the reader with the book, the discovery of the book.

Nothing is built on stone; all is built on sand, but we must build as if the sand were stone.

I can give you my loneliness, my darkness, the hunger of my heart, I am trying to bribe you with uncertainty, with danger, with defeat.

The original is unfaithful to the translation.

Truth never penetrates an unwilling mind.

Dictatorships foster oppression, dictatorships foster servitude, dictatorships foster cruelty; more abominable is the fact that they foster idiocy.

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

Soccer is popular because stupidity is popular.

What you really value is what you miss, not what you have.

The future is inevitable and precise, but it may not occur. God lurks in the gaps.

The tango is a direct expression of something that poets have often tried to state in words: the belief that a fight may be a celebration.

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

I gazed at every mirror on the planet, not one gave back my reflection.

I owe the discovery of Uqbar to the conjunction of a mirror and an encyclopedia.

La duda es uno de los nombres de la inteligencia.

All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.

Reality is not always probable, or likely.

Let others pride themselves about how many pages they have written; I'd rather boast about the ones I've read.

Reality is partial to symmetry and slight anachronisms

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.

There is nothing in the world that is not mysterious, but the mystery is more evident in certain things than in others: in the sea, in the eyes of the elders, in the color yellow, and in music.

The minotaur more than justifies the existence of the labyrinth.

May Heaven exist, even if my place is Hell.

I have committed the worst of sins one can commit... I have not been happy.

Life itself is a quotation.

I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.

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

To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god.

The Falklands thing was a fight between two bald men over a comb.

Doubt is one of the names of intelligence.

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

When writers die they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarnation.

I saw all the mirrors on earth and none of them reflected me.

Time can't be measured in days the way money is measured in pesos and centavos, because all pesos are equal, while every day, perhaps every hour, is different.

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.

A book is not an isolated being: it is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships

A writer's work is the product of laziness.

The mind was dreaming. The world was its dream.

Perhaps the apparent favor of the universe is no more than the crocodile grin of a Doberman breathing hard and about to be hungry?

Loneliness does not worry me; life is difficult enough, putting up with yourself and with your own habits.

In my next life I will try to commit more errors.

It is clear that there is no classification of the Universe that is not arbitrary and full of conjectures. The reason for this is very simple: we do not know what kind of thing the universe is.

Poets, like the blind, can see in the dark.

Creativity is suspended between memory and forgetting.