135 Quotes & Sayings By Jorge Luis Borges

You have wakened not out of sleep, but into a prior dream, and that dream lies within another, and so on, to infinity, which is the number of grains of sand. The path that you are to take is endless, and you will die before you have truly awakened. Jorge Luis Borges

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

Let not the rash marble riskgarrulous breaches of oblivion's omnipotence, in many words recallingname, renown, events, birthplace. All those glass jewels are best left in the dark. Let not the marble say what men do not. The essentials of the dead man's life--the trembling hope, the implacable miracle of pain, the wonder of sensual delight--will abide forever. Blindly the uncertain soul asks to continuewhen it is the lives of others that will make that happen, as you yourself are the mirror and imageof those who did not live as long as youand others will be (and are) your immortality on earth. Jorge Luis Borges

There are objects made up of two sense elements, one visual, the other auditory–the colour of a sunrise and the distant call of a bird. Other objects are made up of many elements–the sun, the water against the swimmer's chest, the vague quivering pink which one sees when the eyes are closed, the feeling of being swept away by a river or by sleep. These second degree objects can be combined with others; using certain abbreviations, the process is practically an infinite one. There are famous poems made up of one enormous word, a word which in truth forms a poetic object, the creation of the writer. The fact that no one believes that nouns refer to an actual reality means, paradoxically enough, that there is no limit to the numbers of them. Jorge Luis Borges

Emma dropped the paper. Her first impression was of a weak feeling in her stomach and in her knees; then of blind guilt, of unreality, of coldness, of fear; then she wished that it were already the next day. Immediately afterwards she realized that that wish was futile because the death of her father was the only thing that had happened in the world, and it would go on happening endlessly. Jorge Luis Borges

Puis il réfléchit: la réalité ne coïncide habituellement pas avec les prévisions; avec une logique perverse, il en déduisit que prévoir un détail circonstanciel, c'est empêcher que celui-ci se réalise. Fidèle à cette faible magie, il inventait, pour les empêcher de se réaliser, des péripéties atroces; naturellement, il finit par craindre que ces péripéties ne fussent prophétiques. Misérable dans la nuit, il essayait de s'affirmer en quelque sorte dans la substance fugitive du temps. Il savait que celui-ci se précipitait vers l'aube du 29; il raisonnait à haute voix; je suis maintenant dans la nuit du 22; tant que durera cette nuit (et six nuits de plus) je suis invulnérable, immortel. Il pensait que les nuits de sommeil étaient des piscines profondes et sombres dans lesquels il pouvait se plonger. Il souhaitait parfois avec impatience la décharge définitive qui le libérerait tant bien que mal de son vain travail d'imagination. Jorge Luis Borges

Sometimes, looking at the many books I have at home, I feel I shall die before I come to the end of them, yet I cannot resist the temptation of buying new books. Whenever I walk into a bookstore and find a book on one of my hobbies – for example, Old English or Old Norse poetry – I say to myself, “What a pity I can’t buy that book, for I already have a copy at home. Jorge Luis Borges

A writer - and, I believe, generally all persons - must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. 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. Jorge Luis Borges

I...have always known that my destiny was, above all, a literary destiny – that bad things and some good things would happen to me, but that, in the long run, all of it would be convertedinto words. Particularly the bad things, since happiness does not need to be transformed: happiness is its own end. Jorge Luis Borges

The famed author Robert Lewis Stevenson declared that he'd trained his Brownies to be writers. As he slept, they would whisper fantastic plots in his ear -- for example, the strange case of Dr. Jekyll and the diabolical Mr. Hyde, and that episode in "Olalla" when a young man from an old Spanish family bites his sister's hand. 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

And yet, and yet… Denying temporal succession, denying the self, denying the astronomical universe, are apparent desperations and secret consolations. Our destiny … is not frightful by being unreal; it is frightful because it is irreversible and iron-clad. Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire. The world, unfortunately, is real; I, unfortunately, am Borges. Jorge Luis Borges

One of the schools in Tlön has reached the point of denying time. It reasons that the present is undefined, that the future has no other reality than as present hope, that the past is no more than present memory. Jorge Luis Borges

It was under English trees that I meditated on that lost labyrinth: I pictured it perfect and inviolate on the secret summit of a mountain; I pictured its outlines blurred by rice paddies, or underwater; I pictured it as infinite–a labyrinth not of octagonal pavillions and paths that turn back upon themselves, but of rivers and provinces and kingdoms.. I imagined a labyrinth of labyrinths, a maze of mazes, a twisting, turning, ever-widening labyrinth that contained both past and future and somehow implied the stars. Absorbed in those illusory imaginings, I forgot that I was a pursued man; I felt myself, for an indefinite while, the abstract perceiver of the world. The vague, living countryside, the moon, the remains of the day did their work in me; so did the gently downward road, which forestalled all possibility of weariness. The evening was near, yet infinite. Jorge Luis Borges

There are official searchers, inquisitors. I have seen them in the performance of their function: they always arrive extremely tired from their journeys; they speak of a broken stairway which almost killed them; they talk with the librarian of galleries and stairs; sometimes they pick up the nearest volume and leaf through it, looking for infamous words. Obviously, no one expects to discover anything. Jorge Luis Borges

A book is more than a verbal structure or series of verbal structures; it is the dialogue it establishes with its reader and the intonation it imposes upon his voice and the changing and durable images it leaves in his memory. A book is not an isolated being: it is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships. Jorge Luis Borges

Of all man’s instruments, the most wondrous, no doubt, is the book. The other instruments are extensions of his body. The microscope, the telescope, are extensions of his sight; the telephone is the extension of his voice; then we have the plow and the sword, extensions of the arm. But the book is something else altogether: the book is an extension of memory and imagination. Jorge Luis Borges

The gods weave misfortunes for men, so that the generations to come will have something to sing about.” Mallarmé repeats, less beautifully, what Homer said; “tout aboutit en un livre, ” everything ends up in a book. The Greeks speak of generations that will sing; Mallarmé speaks of an object, of a thing among things, a book. But the idea is the same; the idea that we are made for art, we are made for memory, we are made for poetry, or perhaps we are made for oblivion. But something remains, and that something is history or poetry, which are not essentially different. . Jorge Luis Borges

My father and he had cemented (the verb is excessive) one of those English friendships which begin by avoiding intimacies and eventually eliminate speech altogether. They used to exchange books and periodicals; they would beat one another at chess, without saying a word. Jorge Luis Borges

The three of them knew it. She was Kafka’s mistress. Kafka had dreamt her. The three of them knew it. He was Kafka’s friend. Kafka had dreamt him. The three of them knew it. The woman said to the friend, Tonight I want you to have me. The three of them knew it. The man replied: If we sin, Kafka will stop dreaming us. One of them knew it. There was no longer anyone on earth. Kafka said to himself Now the two of them have gone, I’m left alone. I’ll stop dreaming myself. Jorge Luis Borges

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

Historical truth, for him, is not what has happened; it is what we judge to have happened. Jorge Luis Borges

There is an hour of the afternoon when the plain is on the verge of saying something. It never says, or perhaps it says it infinitely, or perhaps we do not understand it, or we understand it and it is untranslatable as music. Jorge Luis Borges

Tearing money is an impiety, like throwing away bread. Jorge Luis Borges

We are as ignorant of the meaning of the dragon as we are of the meaning of the universe. Jorge Luis Borges

Reality is not always probable, or likely. 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

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

I suspected once that any human life, however intricate and full it might be, consisted in reality of one moment: the moment when a man knows for all time who he is. Jorge Luis Borges

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

Nothing is built on stone; All is built on sand, but we must build as if the sand were stone. Jorge Luis Borges

From the twilight of day till the twilight of evening, a leopard, in the last years of the thirteenth century, would see some wooden planks, some vertical iron bars, men and women who changed, a wall and perhaps a stone gutter filled with dry leaves. He did not know, could not know, that he longed for love and cruelty and the hot pleasure of tearing things to pieces and the wind carrying the scent of a deer, but something suffocated and rebelled within him and God spoke to him in a dream: "You live and will die in this prison so that a man I know of may see you a certain number of times and not forget you and place your figure and symbol in a poem which has its precise place in the scheme of the universe. You suffer captivity, but you will have given a word to the poem." God, in the dream, illumined the animal's brutishness and the animal understood these reasons and accepted his destiny, but, when he awoke, there was in him only an obscure resignation, a valorous ignorance, for the machinery of the world is much too complex for the simplicity of a beast. Jorge Luis Borges

Blind to all fault, destiny can be ruthless at one's slightest distraction. Jorge Luis Borges

We spend our lives waiting for our book and it never comes. Jorge Luis Borges

And so, as I sleep, some dream beguiles me, and suddenly I know I dream. Then I think: this is a dream, a pure diversion of my will; now that I have unlimited power, I am going to create a tiger. Oh incompetence! Never do my dreams engender the wild beast I longed for. The tiger indeed appears, but stuffed or flimsy, or with impure variations of shape, or of an implausible size, or all too fleeting, or with a touch of the dog or bird. . Jorge Luis Borges

One of the schools of Tl̦n goes so far as to negate time; it reasons that the present is indefinite, that the future has no reality other than as a present hope, that the past has no reality other than as a present memory. Another school declares that all time has already transpired and that our life is only the crepuscular and no doubt falsified an mutilated memory or reflection of an irrecoverable process. Another, that the history of the universe Рand in it our lives and the most tenuous detail of our lives Рis the scripture produced by a subordinate god in order to communicate with a demon. Another, that the universe is comparable to those cryptographs in which not all the symbols are valid and that only what happens every three hundred nights is true. Another, that while we sleep here, we are awake elsewhere and that in this way every man is two men. Jorge Luis Borges

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

Time forks perpetually toward innumerable futures. In one of them I am your enemy. Jorge Luis Borges

Literature is not exhaustible, for the sufficient and simple reason that a single book is not. Jorge Luis Borges

I kept asking myself how a book could be infinite. I could not imagine any other than a cyclic volume, circular. A volume whose last page would be the same as the first and so have the possibility of continuing indefinitely. Jorge Luis Borges

In all fiction, when a man is faced with alternatives he chooses one at the expense of the others. In the almost unfathomable Ts'ui Pen, he chooses — simultaneously — all of them. He thus creates various futures, various times which start others that will in their turn branch out and bifurcate in other times. That is the cause of the contradictions in the novel. Jorge Luis Borges

I do not know whether music knows how to despair over music, or marble over marble, but literature is an art which knows how to prophesize the time in which it might have fallen silent, how to attack its own virtue, and how to fall in love with its own dissolution and court its own end. Jorge Luis Borges

I reread these negative remarks and realize that I do not know whether music can despair of music or marble of marble. I do know that literature is an art that can foresee the time when it will be silenced, an art that can become inflamed with its own virtue, fall in love with its own decline, and court its own demise. Jorge Luis Borges

So witless did these ideas strike me as being, so sweeping and pompous the way they were expressed, that I associated them immediately with literature. Jorge Luis Borges

The metaphysicians of Tlön are not looking for truth, nor even for an approximation of it; they are after a kind of amazement. Jorge Luis Borges

I've fixed my feelings into durable wordswhen they could have been spent on tenderness Jorge Luis Borges

I cannot lament the loss of a love or a friendship without meditating that one loses only what one really never had. Jorge Luis Borges

We are ignorant of the meaning of the dragon in the same way that we are ignorant of the meaning of the universe; but there is something in the dragon’s image that fits man’s imagination, and this accounts for the dragon’s appearance in different places and periods. Jorge Luis Borges

All theories are legitimate, no matter. What matters is what you do with them. Jorge Luis Borges

I imagined a labyrinth of labyrinths, a maze of mazes, a twisting, turning, ever-widening labyrinth that contained both past and future and somehow implied the stars. Absorbed in those illusory imaginings, I forgot that I was a pursued man; I felt myself, for an indefinite while, the abstract perceiver of the world. The vague, living countryside, the moon, the remains of the day did their work in me; so did the gently downward road, which forestalled all possibility of weariness. The evening was near, yet infinite. . Jorge Luis Borges

If you sell, say, two thousand copies, it is the same thing as if you had sold nothing at all because two thousand is too vast– I mean, for the imagination to grasp. While thirty-seven people–perhaps thirty-seven are too many, perhaps seventeen would have been better or even seven–but still thirty-seven are still within the scope of one's imagination. Jorge Luis Borges

One day or one night–between my days and nights, what difference can there be?– I dreamed that there was a grain of sand on the floor of my cell. Unconcerned, I went back to sleep; I dreamed that I woke up and there were two grains of sand. Again I slept; I dreamed that now there were three. Thus the grains of sand multiplied, little by little, until they filled the cell and I was dying beneath that hemisphere of sand. I realized that I was dreaming; with a vast effort I woke myself. But waking up was useless– I was suffocated by the countless sand. Someone said to me: You have wakened not out of sleep, but into a prior dream, and that dream lies within another, and so on, to infinity, which is the number of the grains of sand. The path that you are to take is endless, and you will die before you have truly awakened. I felt lost. The sand crushed my mouth, but I cried out: I cannot be killed by sand that I dream –nor is there any such thing as a dream within a dream.– Jorge Luis Borges, The Writing of the God. Jorge Luis Borges

Useless to tell myself that a dreamand the memory of yesterday are the same thing Jorge Luis Borges

Man's memory shapes Its own Eden within Jorge Luis Borges

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

A circle drawn on a blackboard, a right triangle, a rhombus--all these are forms we can fully intuit; Ireneo could do the same with the stormy mane of a young colt, a small herd of cattle on a mountainside, a flickering fire and its uncountable ashes, and the many faces of a dead man at a wake. I have no idea how many stars he saw in the sky. Jorge Luis Borges

Ferrari: How odd, Borges, it seems that we are talking constantly through memory. Sometimes, our conversations remind me of a dialogue between two memories. Borges: In fact, that’s what it is. If we are something, we are our past, aren’t we? Our past is not what can be recorded in a biography or in the newspapers. Our past is our memory. That memory can be hidden or inaccurate–it doesn’t matter. It’s there, isn’t it? It can be a lie but that lie becomes part of our memory, part of us. (Conversations, Vol. 1) . Jorge Luis Borges

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. Jorge Luis Borges

I'm alone and nobody is in the mirror Jorge Luis Borges

I have no way of knowing whether the events that I am about to narrate are effects or causes. Jorge Luis Borges

I do not know which of us has written this page. Jorge Luis Borges

I owe my first inkling of the problem of infinity to a large biscuit tin that was a source of vertiginous mystery during my childhood. Jorge Luis Borges

Poets, like the blind, can see in the dark. Jorge Luis Borges

Lost in these imaginary illusions I forgot my destiny — that of the hunted. Jorge Luis Borges

It seemed incredible that this day, a day without warnings or omens, might be that of my implacable death. Jorge Luis Borges

God, in the dream, illumined the animal's brutishness and he understood the reasons, and accepted his destiny; but when he awoke there was only a dark resignation, a valiant ignorance, for the machinery of the world is far too complex for the simplicity of a wild beast. Years later, Dante was dying in Ravenna, as unjustified and as lonely as any other man. In a dream, God declared to him the secret purpose of his life and work; Dante, in wonderment, knew at last who and what he was and blessed the bitterness of his life..upon waking, he felt that he had received and lost an infinite thing, something that he would not be able to recuperate or even glimpse, for the machinery of the world is much too complex for the simplicity of a man. Jorge Luis Borges

The library will endure; it is the universe. As for us, everything has not been written; we are not turning into phantoms. We walk the corridors, searching the shelves and rearranging them, looking for lines of meaning amid leagues of cacophony and incoherence, reading the history of the past and our future, collecting our thoughts and collecting the thoughts of others, and every so often glimpsing mirrors, in which we may recognize creatures of the information. Jorge Luis Borges

There is nothing but quotations left for us. Our language is a system of quotations. Jorge Luis Borges

I cannot combine some charactersdhcmrlchtdjwhich the divine Library has not foreseen and which in one of its secret tongues do not contain a terrible meaning. No one can articulate a syllable which is not filled with tenderness and fear, which is not, in one of these languages, the powerful name of a god. To speak is to fall into tautology. Jorge Luis Borges

To think is to ignore the differences, to generalize, to abstract. Jorge Luis Borges

Things, events, that occupy space yet come to an end when someone dies make us stop in wonder - and yet one thing, or an infinite number of things, dies with every man's or woman's death, unless the universe itself has a memory, as theosophists have suggested. In the course of time there was one day that closed the last eyes that had looked on Christ; the battle of Junín and the love of Helen died with the death of one man. What will die with me the day I die? What pathetic or frail image will be lost to the world? The voice of Macedonio Fernández, the image of a bay horse in a vacant lot on the corner of Sarrano and Charcas, a bar of sulfur in the drawer of a mahogany desk? . Jorge Luis Borges

The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite, perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries. Jorge Luis Borges

The Library is a sphere whose exact centre is any one of its hexagons and whose circumference is inaccessible. Jorge Luis Borges

So my life is a point-counterpoint, a kind of fugue, and a falling away—and everything winds up being lost to me, and everything falls into oblivion, or into the hands of the other man. Jorge Luis Borges

If we think of the novel and the epic... The difference lies in the fact that the important thing about the epic is a hero--a man who is a pattern for all men. While, as Mencken pointed out, the essence of most novels lies in the breaking down of a man, in the degeneration of character. Jorge Luis Borges

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

There are those who seek the love of a woman to forget her, to not think about her. Jorge Luis Borges

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

If honor and wisdom and happiness are not for me, let them be for others. Let heaven exist, though my place be in hell. Jorge Luis Borges

But let no one imagine that we were mere ascetics. There is no more complex pleasure than thought, and it was to thought that we delivered ourselves over. Jorge Luis Borges

I carried out my plan because I felt The Chief had some fear of those of my race, of those uncountable forebears whose culmination lies in me. I wished to prove to him that a yellow man could save his armies. Jorge Luis Borges

He [Omar Khayyam] is an atheist, but knows how to interpret in orthodox style the most difficult passages of the Koran; for every educated man is a theologian and faith is not a requisite. Jorge Luis Borges