Quotes by
Jorge Luis Borges |
1899-1986 , Argentine writer
Short-story writer, poet, essayist, and a key figure in and universal literature. His best-known books, Ficciones (Fictions) and El Aleph (The Aleph), published in the 1940s, are compilations of short stories interconnected by common themes, which include labyrinths, philosophers, libraries, dreams, mirrors, fictional writers, and mythology.Borges’ works have contributed to philosophical literature and the fantasy genre, and have been considered by some critics to mark the beginning of the magic realist movement in the 20th century Latin American literature.
| 46 quotes | 1,935 visits |
Quotations
| • | Time is the tiger that devours me, but I am that tiger. 7 |
| • | Being with you and not being with you is the only way I have to measure time. 7 |
| • | Nothing is built on stone. All is built on sand, but we must build as if the sand were stone. 5 |
| • | I believe that in time we will have reached the point where we will deserve to be free of government. 4 |
| • | I am not sure of anything, I know nothing... can you imagine that I don't even know the date of my own death? 4 |
| • | Poetry always remembers that it was an oral art before it was a written art. It remembers that it was first song. 4 |
| • | Heaven and hell seem out of proportion to me: the actions of men do not deserve so much. 4 |
| • | I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library. 4 |
| • | Don't talk unless you can improve the silence. 4 |
| • | I never reread what I've written. I'm far too afraid to feel ashamed of what I've done. |
| • | In the Bible there are images, myths, a religion; only there is no thought, no reflection. It was the Greeks who first really started to think, the first to create a sophisticated civilization. |
| • | It is not appropriate for a gentleman to support anything but a lost cause. |
| • | I decided many times to go into metaphysics, but I was interrupted by happiness. |
| • | It is a shame that we have to choose between two such second-class countries as the Soviet Union and the United States. |
| • | The central fact of my life has been the existence of words and the possibility of weaving those words into poetry. |
| • | A writer – and, I believe, generally all persons – must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. |
| • | If I were asked to name the chief event in my life, I should say my father's library. |
| • | There's no need to build a labyrinth when the entire universe is one. |
| • | My books standing there on the shelf do not know that I have written them. |
| • | Death is just infinity closing in. |
| • | Creativity is suspended between memory and forgetting. |
| • | Football is popular because stupidity is popular. |
| • | Reading … is an activity subsequent to writing: more resigned, more civil, more intellectual. |
| • | May Heaven exist, even if my place is Hell. |
| • | The original is unfaithful to the translation. |
| • | Dictatorships foster oppression, dictatorships foster servitude, dictatorships foster cruelty; more abominable is the fact that they foster idiocy. |
| • | 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. |
| • | Writing is nothing more than a guided dream. |
| • | Doubt is one of the names of intelligence. |
| • | I have committed the worst sin that can be committed. I have not been happy. |
| • | Life itself is a quotation. |
| • | Reality is not always probable, or likely. But if you're writing a story, you have to make it as plausible as you can, because if not, the reader's imagination will reject it. |
| • | To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god. |
| • | Myth is at the beginning of literature, and also at its end. |
| • | Of course, like all young men, I tried to be as unhappy as I could – a kind of Hamlet and Raskolnikov rolled into one. |
| • | 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. |
| • | I have no way of knowing whether the events that I am about to narrate are effects or causes. |
| • | There are those who seek the love of a woman to forget her, to not think about her. |
| • | We accept reality so readily – perhaps because we sense that nothing is real. |
| • | He consorted with prostitutes and poets...and with persons even worse. |
| • | Literature is not exhaustible, for the sufficient and simple reason that a single book is not. |
| • | I saw all the mirrors on earth and none of them reflected me. |
| • | 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 cannot sleep unless I am surrounded by books. |
| • | The dictionary is based on the hypothesis – obviously an unproven one – that languages are made up of equivalent synonyms. |
| • | 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. |
