JORGE LUIS BORGES QUOTES
Argentine author (1899-1986)
Man's memory shapes
Its own Eden within.
JORGE LUIS BORGES
Dreamtigers
Every novel is an ideal plane inserted into the realm of reality.
JORGE LUIS BORGES
"Partial Magic in the Quixote", Labyrinths
To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god.
JORGE LUIS BORGES
"The Meeting in a Dream", Other Inquisitions
May Heaven exist, even if my place is Hell.
JORGE LUIS BORGES
"The Library of Babel"
No one is anyone, one single immortal man is all men. Like Cornelius Agrippa, I am god, I am hero, I am philosopher, I am demon and I am world, which is a tedious way of saying that I do not exist.
JORGE LUIS BORGES
"The Immortal"
Time, which despoils castles, enriches verses.
JORGE LUIS BORGES
"Averroes' Search"
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
"Note on (toward) Bernard Shaw", Other Inquisitions
I think nowadays, while literary men seem to have neglected their epic duties, the epic has been saved for us, strangely enough, by the Westerns.
JORGE LUIS BORGES
The Paris Review, winter-spring 1967
The heresies we should fear are those which can be confused with orthodoxy.
JORGE LUIS BORGES
The Theologians
We feel poetry as we feel the closeness of a woman, or as we feel a mountain or a bay. If we feel it immediately, why dilute it with other words, which no doubt will be weaker than our feelings?
JORGE LUIS BORGES
"Poetry"
This happy conjecture affirmed that there is only one subject, that this indivisible subject is every being in the universe and that these beings are the organs and masks of the divinity.
JORGE LUIS BORGES
Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius
As I think of the many myths, there is one that is very harmful, and that is the myth of countries. I mean, why should I think of myself as being an Argentine, and not a Chilean, and not an Uruguayan. I don't know really. All of those myths that we impose on ourselves -- and they make for hatred, for war, for enmity -- are very harmful. Well, I suppose in the long run, governments and countries will die out and we'll be just, well, cosmopolitans.
JORGE LUIS BORGES
Artful Dodge, April 1980
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.
JORGE LUIS BORGES
"Avatars of the Tortoise", Discussion
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.
JORGE LUIS BORGES
The Analytical Language of John Wilkins
The future is inevitable and precise, but it may not occur. God lurks in the gaps.
JORGE LUIS BORGES
"Creation and P. H. Gosse", Other Inquisitions
Fame is a form, perhaps the worst form, of incomprehension.
JORGE LUIS BORGES
Ficciones
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.
JORGE LUIS BORGES
"A New Refutation of Time", Other Inquisitions
Life and death have been lacking in my life.
JORGE LUIS BORGES
prologue, Discussion
The things that are said in literature are always the same. What is important is the way they are said.
JORGE LUIS BORGES
The Paris Review, winter-spring 1967
I know of one semibarbarous zone whose librarians repudiate the "vain and superstitious habit" of trying to find sense in books, equating such a quest with attempting to find meaning in dreams or in the chaotic lines on the palms of one's hand.
JORGE LUIS BORGES
"The Library of Babel"