Jorge Luis Borges Quotes

There's no need to build a labyrinth when the entire universe is one.

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.

I believe that in time we will have reached the point where we will deserve to be free of government.

A system is nothing more than the subordination of all aspects of the universe to any one of such aspects.

Besides, rereading, not reading, is what counts.

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

I cannot walk through the suburbs in the solitude of the night without thinking that the night pleases us because it suppresses idle details, just as our memory does.

Only in the present do things happen.

The central problem of novel-writing is causality.

If I were asked to name the chief event in my life, I should say my father's library.

Man's memory shapes Its own Eden within

Writing is nothing more than a guided dream.

From my weakness, I drew strength that never left me.

Reading is an activity subsequent to writing: more resigned, more civil, more intellectual.

Time forks perpetually toward innumerable futures.

While we are asleep in this world, we are awake in another one

The dictionary is based on the hypothesis -- obviously an unproven one -- that languages are made up of equivalent synonyms.

Democracy is an abuse of statistics.

Time is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire.

i walk slowly, like one who comes from so far away he doesn't expect to arrive

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.

Captivated by its discipline, humanity forgets and goes on forgetting that it is the discipline of chess players, not of angels.

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.

If space is infinite, we may be at any point in space. If time is infinite, we may be at any point in time.

Reality may avoid the obligation to be interesting, but ... hypotheses may not.

In general, every country has the language it deserves.

I think of reading a book as no less an experience than travelling or falling in love.

Every man should be capable of all ideas.

What I'm really concerned about is reaching one person. And that person may be myself for all I know.

Poetry remembers that it was an oral art before it was a written art.

He consorted with prostitutes and poets...and with persons even worse.

I am not sure of anything, I know nothing . . . can you imagine that I don't even know the date of my own death?

My undertaking is not difficult, essentially. I should only have to be immortal to carry it out.

The things that are said in literature are always the same. What is important is the way they are said.

The visible universe was an illusion or, more precisely, a sophism. Mirrors and fatherhood are abominable because they multiply it and extend it.

Every novel is an ideal plane inserted into the realm of reality.

We have a very precise image - an image at times shameless - of what we have lost, but we are ignorant of what may follow or replace it.

Translations are a partial and precious documentation of the changes the text suffers.

To be immortal is commonplace; except for man, all creatures are immortal, for they are ignorant of death; what is divine, terrible, incomprehensible, is to know that one is immortal.

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

Fame is a form, perhaps the worst form, of incomprehension.

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

Time, which despoils castles, enriches verses.

What a writer wants to do is not what he does.

My books standing there on the shelf do not know that I have written them.

To die for a religion is easier than to live it absolutely.

We forget that we are all dead men conversing with dead men.

Each thing implies the universe.

I never reread what I've written. I'm far too afraid to feel ashamed of what I've done.

Heaven and hell seem out of proportion to me: the actions of men do not deserve so much.