Jorge Luis Borges quotes:

When writers die they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarnation.[As attributed by Alastair Reid in Neruda and Borges, The New Yorker, June 24, 1996; as well as in The Talk of the Town, The New Yorker, July 7, 1986]

Any life is made up of a single moment, the moment in which a man finds out, once and for all, who he is.

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

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

I have used the philosophers' ideas for my own private literary purposes, but I don't think that I'm a thinker. I suppose that my thinking has been done for me by Berkeley, by Hume, by Schopenhauer, by Mauthner perhaps.

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

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.

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

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

Life and death have been lacking in my life.

The central problem of novel-writing is causality.

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.

Writing is nothing more than a guided dream.

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

Israelites, Christians and Muslims profess immortality, but the veneration they render this world proves they believe only in it, since they destine all other worlds, in infinite number, to be its reward or punishment."

There is a concept that is the corrupter and destroyer of all others. I speak not of Evil, whose limited empire is that of ethics; I speak of the infinite.

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.

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.

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

My advanced age has taught me the resignation of being Borges.

The truth is that we live out our lives putting off all that can be put off; perhaps we all know deep down that we are immortal and that sooner or later all men will do and know all things.

Democracy is an abuse of statistics.

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

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.

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.

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

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

Out of this city marched armies that seemed to be great, and afterwards were when glory had magnified them.As the years went by, an occasional soldier returned, and with a foreign trace to his speech, told tales of what had happened to him in places called Ituzaingo or Ayacucho.These things, now, are as if they had never been.--Martin Fierro

How can we manage to illuminate the pathos of our lives?

Their books are also different. Works of fiction contain a single plot, with all its imaginable permutations. Those of a philosophical nature invariably include both the thesis and the antithesis, the rigorous pro and con of a doctrine. A book which does not contain its counterbook is considered incomplete."

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

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

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.

A writer needs loneliness, and he gets his share of it. He needs love, and he gets shared and also unshared love. He needs friendship. In fact, he needs the universe. To be a writer is, in a sense, to be a day-dreamer - to be living a kind of double life.

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.

One concept corrupts and confuses the others. I am not speaking of the Evil whose limited sphere is ethics; I am speaking of the infinite.

Writing long books is a laborious and impoverishing act of foolishness: expanding in five hundred pages an idea that could be perfectly explained in a few minutes. A better procedure is to pretend that those books already exist and to offer a summary, a commentary.

The flattery of posterity is not worth much more than contemporary flattery, which is worth nothing.

It also occurred to him that throughout history, humankind has told two stories: the story of a lost ship sailing the Mediterranean seas in quest of a beloved isle, and the story of a god who allows himself to be crucified on Golgotha.

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.

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

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.

Being an agnostic means all things are possible, even God, even the Holy Trinity. This world is so strange that anything may happen, or may not happen. Being an agnostic makes me live in a larger, a more fantastic kind of world, almost uncanny. It makes me more tolerant.

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

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

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

The future is as irrevocable as an inflexible yesterday.

I don't think we're capable of knowledge, but I like to keep an open mind. So if you ask me whether I believe in an afterlife or not, whether I believe in God or not, I can only answer you that all things are possible. And if all things are possible, heaven and hell and the angels are also possible. They're not to be ruled out.

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

What will die with me the day I die? What pathetic or frail image will be lost to the world? The voice of Macedonio Fernandez, 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?

The minotaur more than justifies the existence of the labyrinth .

You will reply that reality hasn't the slightest need to be of interest. And I'll answer you that reality may avoid the obligation to be interesting, but that hypotheses may not. In the hypothesis you have postulated, chance intervenes largely. Here lies a dead rabbi; I should prefer a purely rabbinical explanation; not the imaginary mischances of an imaginary robber.

What will die with me when I die, what pathetic or fragile form will the world lose?

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 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.

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

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

Truly fine poetry must be read aloud. A good poem does not allow itself to be read in a low voice or silently. If we can read it silently, it is not a valid poem: a poem demands pronunciation. Poetry always remembers that it was an oral art before it was a written art. It remembers that it was first song.

Life itself is a quotation.

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.

Besides, rereading, not reading, is what counts.

...the image of the Lord had been replaced by a mirror

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

A writer, or any man, must believe that whatever happens to him is an instrument; everything has been given for an end. This is even stronger in the case of the artist. Everything that happens, including humiliations, embarrassments, misfortunes, all has been given like clay, like material for one's art. One must accept it.

I speak in a poem of the ancient food of heroes: humiliation, unhappiness, discord. Those things are given to us to transform, so that we may make from the miserable circumstances of our lives things that are eternal, or aspire to be so.

With relief, with humiliation, with terror, he understood that he too was a mere appearance, dreamt by another.

We are as ignorant of the meaning of the dragon as we are of the meaning of the universe.

They seek neither truth nor likelihood; they seek astonishment. They think metaphysics is a branch of the literature of fantasy

Unappreciated because too many of his [Rudyard Kipling's] peers were socialists.

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

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

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

Time is forever dividing itself toward innumerable futures and in one of them I am your enemy.

Casi no soy, pero mis versos ritmanla vida y su esplendor. Yo fui Walt Whitman.

A necessary monster.

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

Many of the characters are fools and they're always playing tricks on meand treating me badly.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

This felicitous supposition declared that there is only one Individual, and that this indivisible Individual is every one of the separate beings in the universe, and that these beings are the instruments and masks of divinity itself.

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

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.

Reality is not always probable, or likely.

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.

The original is unfaithful to the translation.

Your unforgivable sins do not allow you to see my splendor

It's a shame that we have to choose between two such second-rate countries as the USSR and the USA.

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

Time is the substance from which I am made. Time is a river which carries me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger that devours me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire.

In the order of literature, as in others, there is no act that is not the coronation of an infinite series of causes and the source of an infinite series of effects.

Like all those possessing a library, Aurelian was aware that he was guilty of not knowing his in its entirety.

Like all writers, he measured the achievements of others by what they had accomplished, asking of them that they measure him by what he envisaged or planned.

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

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.

Don't talk unless you can improve the silence.

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

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.

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

Soccer is popular because stupidity is popular.

La duda es uno de los nombres de la inteligencia.

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

Creativity is suspended between memory and forgetting.

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

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

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

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

Then he reflected that reality does not usually coincide with our anticipation of it; with a logic of his own he inferred that to forsee a circumstantial detail is to prevent its happening. Trusting in this weak magic, he invented, so that they would not happen, the most gruesome details.

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

We (the indivisible divinity that works in us) have dreamed the world . We have dreamed it resistant, mysterious, visible, ubiquitous in space and firm in time, but we have allowed slight, and eternal, bits of the irrational to form part of its architecture so as to know that it is false.

The task of art is to transform what is continuously happening to us, to transform all of these things into symbols, into music, into something which can last in man's memory. That is our duty. If we don't fulfill it, we feel unhappy.

A writer's work is the product of laziness.

Truth never penetrates an unwilling mind.

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