Best quotes by Jorge Luis Borges

IdentitySelf-PerceptionSelf-ReflectionSelf-AwarenessI gazed at every mirror on the planet, not one gave back my reflection.

LibraryFormI had always thought of Paradise / In form and image as a library.

DreamsPerceptionExistenceRealityWe (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.

PoetryMemoryJorge Luis BorgesPoetry remembers that it was an oral art before it was a written art.

Jorge Luis BorgesHow can we manage to illuminate the pathos of our lives?

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

DreamsPerceptionMortalityRealityYou 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.

TimeSelf-IdentityExistentialismTime is the tiger that devours me, but I am that tiger.

CreativityPoetryNo 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.

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

BeliefReligionHe was very religious; he believed that he had a secret pact with God which exempted him from doing good in exchange for prayers and piety.

KnowledgePossibilitiesFamiliarityReadingThe man who acquires an encyclopedia does not thereby acquire every line, every paragraph, every page, and every illustration; he acquires the possibility of becoming familiar with one and another of those things.

UncertaintyChangeLossIgnoranceWe 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.

КоханціHappinessLoveHappy are the beloved and the lovers and those who can live without love.

Art is very mysterious. I wonder if you can really do any damage to art. I think that when we're writing, something comes through or should come through, in spite of our theories. So theories are not really important.

FriendshipLoveWritingLonelinessA 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.

ArtCriticismPracticeOrganizationLibraryTo arrange a library is to practice in a quiet and modest way the art of criticism.

DreamsCreativityWritingImaginationWriting is nothing more than a guided dream.

I think most people are more important than their opinions.

PhilosophyDeathExistentialismDeath is just infinity closing in.

CreativityInfluenceMetaphorCensorshipLiteratureCensorship is the mother of metaphor.

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

TimeMoneyPerceptionYou can't measure time by days, the way you measure money by dollars and cents, because dollars are all the same while every day is different and maybe every hour as well.

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

Personal GrowthSelf-ReflectionExistentialismWhat I'm really concerned about is reaching one person. And that person may be myself for all I know.

PoetryTruly 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.

FearRecognitionDespairMemoryDays and nights passed over this despair of flesh, but one morning he awoke, looked (with calm now) at the blurred things that lay about him, and felt, inexplicably, the way one might feel upon recognizing a melody or a voice, that all this had happened to him before and that he had faced it with fear but also with joy and hopefulness and curiosity. Then he descended into his memory, which seemed to him endless, and managed to draw up from that vertigo the lost remembrance that gleamed like a coin in the rain - perhaps because he had never really looked at it except (perhaps) in a dream.

When you come right down to it, opinions are the most superficial things about anyone

KnowledgePersonal PreferencesDeathAfterlifeImmortalityI 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.

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

ImmortalityI 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.

PerceptionUncertaintyRealityReality is not always probable, or likely.

IdentityExistenceMemoryGodSelfI suppose identity depends on memory. And if my memory is blotted out, then I wonder if I exist - I mean, if I am the same person. Of course, I don't have to solve that problem. It's up to God, if any.

Self-PerceptionHuman NatureImaginationMemoryMan's memory shapes Its own Eden within

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

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

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

PerceptionSelf-ReflectionExistenceThe earth we inhabit is an error, an incompetent parody. Mirrors and paternity are abominable because they multiply and affirm it.

Two aesthetics exist: the passive aesthetic of mirrors and the active aesthetic of prisms. Guided by the former, art turns into a copy of the environment's objectivity or the individual's psychic history. Guided by the latter, art is redeemed, makes the world into its instrument, and forges, beyond spatial and temporal prisons, a personal vision.

LifeIdentityImpermanenceExistenceThe 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.

CreativityInspirationWriting ProcessListeningWhen I feel I'm going to write something, then I just am quiet and I try to listen. Then something comes through. And I do what I can in order not to tamper with it.

Do you want to see what human eyes have never seen? Look at the moon. Do you want to hear what ears have never heard? Listen to the bird's cry. Do you want to touch what hands have never touched? Touch the earth. Verily I say that God is about to create the world.

TimePerceptionExistenceInterconnectednessSignificanceThen I reflect that all things happen, happen to one, precisely now. Century follows century, and things happen only in the present. There are countless men in the air, on land and at sea, and all that really happens happens to me.

HopeImmortalityI ask of any God, of any gods, that if they give immortality, I hope to be granted oblivion also.

MortalityDeathNot a single star will be left in the night. The night will not be left. I will die and, with me, the weight of the intolerable universe. I shall erase the pyramids, the medallions, the continents and faces. I shall erase the accumulated past. I shall make dust of history, dust of dust. Now I am looking on the final sunset. I am hearing the last bird. I bequeath nothingness to no one.

IdentityLanguageCultureStereotypesIn general, every country has the language it deserves.

UnderstandingPerceptionKnowledgeExplorationI confess that I have not cleared a path through all seven hundred pages, I confess to having examined only bits and pieces, and yet I know what it is, with that bold and legitimate certainty with which we assert our knowledge of a city, without ever having been rewarded with the intimacy of all the many streets it includes.

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

FearConfusionThe heresies we should fear are those which can be confused with orthodoxy.

BooksWritingWriting 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.

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

DemocracyGovernmentPoliticsDemocracy is an abuse of statistics.

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

Decision-MakingChoicesConsequencesFictionIn all fiction, when a man is faced with alternatives he chooses one at the expense of others.

RelationshipsImmortalityTo say good-bye is to deny separation; it is to say Today we play at going our own ways, but we'll see each other tomorrow. Men invented farewells because they somehow knew themselves to be immortal, even while seeing themselves as contingent and ephemeral.

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

ManI thought that a man can be an enemy of other men, of the moments of other men, but not of a country: not of fireflies, words, gardens, streams of water, sunsets.

MusicMusic, feelings of happiness, mythology, faces worn by time, certain twilights and certain places, want to tell us something, or they told us something that we should not have missed, or they are about to tell us something; this imminence of a revelation that is not produced is, perhaps, the esthetic event.

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

ArtPoetryMemoryHistoryThe 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.

TimeExistencePossibilityThe web of time - the strands of which approach one another, bifurcate, intersect, or ignore each other through the centuries - embraces "every" possibility. We do not exist in most of them. In some you exist and not I, while in others I do, and you do not, and in yet others both of us exist.

TimeLifePerceptionExistenceMemoryAnother 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.

ColorI saw a sunset in Queretaro that seemed to reflect the color of a rose in Bengal.

IdentitySubjectivityInterpretationPerception Of RealityNowadays, one of the churches of Tlön maintains platonically that such and such a pain, such and such a greenish-yellow colour, such and such a temperature, such and such a sound, etc., make up the only reality there is. All men, in the climactic instant of coitus, are the same man. All men who repeat one line of Shakespeare are William Shakespeare.

SymbolismThe minotaur more than justifies the existence of the labyrinth.

PerseveranceChang Tzu tells us of a persevering man who after three laborious years mastered the art of dragon-slaying. For the rest of his days, he had not a single opportunity to test his skills.

IdentityPerceptionIllusionMemorySelfWe are our memory, we are that chimerical museum of shifting shapes, that pile of broken mirrors.

HappinessExistenceLanguageInterpretationPerspectiveThe word happiness exists in every language; it is plausible the thing itself exists.

Work EthicCreativityProductivityArtistic ProcessWriting ProcessA writer's work is the product of laziness.

I think that the reader should enrich what he is reading. He should misunderstand the text; he should change it into something else.

The sea is an idiom I cannot decipher.

PerceptionSkepticismLiteratureCultural DifferencesAwardsThe European and the North American consider that a book that has been awarded any kind of prize must be good; the Argentine allows for the possibility that the book might not be bad, despite the prize.

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

ArtCreativityPurposePerspectiveAdversityA 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.

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