Jorge Luis Borges Quotes

Jorge Luis Borges Quotes

Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges, was a brief story author, editor, essayist and critic from Argentina, who’s thought to be probably the most completed brief story writers on the earth. Borges was educated in Switzerland and travelled throughout throughout his childhood, that gave him a novel worldview in his literary pursiuts.Borges wrote in Spanish and stays one of many icons of Spanish literature, having written such masterpieces like El Aleph and Ficciones, each being collections of brief tales.

His books of collected tales contained tales that had been truly interlinked and was a novel story telling type, that made him a vastly standard writer of the Nineteen Forties. Aside from being a large of Spanish literature in his personal proper, Borges additionally influenced the author who emerged through the years. He was a pioneer forward of his time and it’s believed that he was the true pioneer of magic realism in literature.

In response to a critic, his ebook of collected brief tales ‘A Common His-tory of Infamy’ is probably the primary occasion of magic realism. Borges’ tales and life additionally produced an unlimited variety of quotes that could possibly be completely relevant within the fashionable world.

Listed below are among the chosen ones.

• “I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.” Jorge Luis Borges
• “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.”
  Jorge Luis Borges
• “I cannot sleep unless I am surrounded by books.” Jorge Luis Borges
• “Let others pride themselves about how many pages they have written; I’d rather boast about the ones I’ve read.” Jorge Luis Borges
• “Being with you and not being with you is the only way I have to measure time.” Jorge Luis Borges
• “To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god.” Jorge Luis Borges
• “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.” Jorge Luis Borges
• “The mind was dreaming. The world was its dream.” Jorge Luis Borges
• “Heaven and hell seem out of proportion to me: the actions of men do not deserve so much.” Jorge Luis Borges
• “Reality is not always probable, or likely.” Jorge Luis Borges
• “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.” Jorge Luis Borges
• “Life itself is a quotation.” Jorge Luis Borges
• “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.”  Jorge Luis Borges
• “So plant your own gardens and decorate your own soul, instead of waiting for someone to bring you flowers.”
• “Don’t talk unless you can improve the silence.”
• “Writing is nothing more than a guided dream.”
• “The original is unfaithful to the translation.”
• “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.”
• “Nothing is built on stone; All is built on sand, but we must build as if the sand were stone.”
• “To die for a religion is easier than to live it absolutely.”
• “Besides, rereading, not reading, is what counts.”
• “You 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.”
• “You who read me, are You sure of understanding my language?”
• “I have no way of knowing whether the events that I am about to narrate are effects or causes.”
• “Time is the tiger that devours me, but I am that tiger.”
• “Man’s memory shapes Its own Eden within”
• “Like all those possessing a library, Aurelian was aware that he was guilty of not knowing his in its entirety.”
• “There are those who seek the love of a woman to forget her, to not think about her.”
• “When you reach my age, you realize you couldn’t have done things very much better or much worse than you did them in the first place.”
• “What man of us has never felt, walking through the twilight or writing down a date from his past, that he has lost something infinite?”
• “We accept reality so readily – perhaps because we sense that nothing is real.”
• “I 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.”
• “Estoy solo y no hay nadie en el espejo.”
• “The dictionary is based on the hypothesis — obviously an unproven one — that languages are made up of equivalent synonyms.”
• “He thought that the rose was to be found in its own eternity and not in his words; and that we may mention or allude to a thing, but not express it.”
• “It means much to have loved, to have been happy, to have laid my hand on the living Garden, even for a day.”
• “I believe that in time we will have reached the point where we will deserve to be free of government.”
• “I walk slowly, like one who comes from so far away he doesn’t expect to arrive”
• “A book is not an isolated being: it is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships”
• “He 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.”
• “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.”
• “We have shared out, like thieves, the amazing treasures of days and nights.”
• “It may be that universal history is the history of the different intonations given a handful of metaphors.”
• “Paradise will be a kind of library”
• “I think that the reader should enrich what he is reading. He should misunderstand the text; he should change it into something else.”
• “Leaving behind the babble of the plaza, I enter the Library. I feel, almost physically, the gravitation of the books, the enveloping serenity of order, time magically dessicated and preserved.”
• “Fame is a form, perhaps the worst form, of incomprehension.”
• “Loneliness does not worry me; life is difficult enough, putting up with yourself and with your own habits.”
  Life Yourself
• “The machinery of the world is far too complex for the simplicity of men.”
  The certainty that everything has already been written annuls us, or renders us phantasmal.”
  Jorge Luis Borges
• os. No los lean, por favor, si no obtienen placer.”
  Me labyrinth.”
• “Happy are the beloved and the lovers and those who can live without love.”
  Love
• “We are as ignorant of the meaning of the dragon as we are of the meaning of the universe.”
• “He consorted with prostitutes and poets…and with persons even worse.”
• “Thus my life is a flight and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to him.”
  Life I
• “Que el cielo exista, aunque mi lugar sea el infierno.”
• “From my weakness, I drew strength that never left me.”
• “It’s a shame that we have to choose between two such second-rate countries as the USSR and the USA.”
• “Literature is not exhaustible, for the sufficient and simple reason that a single book is not.”
• “He measured the achievements of others by what they had accomplished, asking of them that they measure him by what he envisaged or planned.”
• “The years go by, and I’ve told the story so many times that I’m not sure anymore whether I actually remember it or whether I just remember the words I tell it with.”
• “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.”
• “I saw all the mirrors on earth and none of them reflected me…”
• “With relief, with humiliation, with terror, he understood that he too was a mere appearance, dreamt by another.”
• “Chang 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.”
• “I have always imagined that Paradise will be some kind of library.”
• “The art of writing is mysterious, the opinions we hold are ephemeral….”
• “Captivated by its discipline, humanity forgets and goes on forgetting that it is the discipline of chess players, not of angels.”
• “When I wake up, I wake to something worse. It’s the astonishment of being myself”
• “God must not engage in theology. The writer must not destroy by human reasonings the faith that art requires of us.”
• “Let neither tear nor reproach besmirch this declaration of the mastery of God who, with magnificent irony, granted me both the gift of books and the night.”
• “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.”
• “Time forks perpetually toward innumerable futures. In one of them I am your enemy.”
  Time I
  Jorge Luis Borges
• “A man sets himself the task of portraying the world. Shortly before he dies he discovers that this patient labyrinth of lines is a drawing of his own face.”
  Jorge Luis Borges
• “Mi carne puede tener miedo; yo, no.”
  Jorge Luis Borges
• “Reading . . . is an activity subsequent to writing: more resigned, more civil, more intellectual.”
  Jorge Luis Borges
• “As the end approaches, there are no longer any images from memory – there are only words.”
  Jorge Luis Borges
• “…..a miracle has the right to impose conditions.”
  Miracle
  Jorge Luis Borges
• “When a writer dies, he becomes his books.”
  Books
  Jorge Luis Borges
• “All men who repeat a line from Shakespeare are William Shakespeare”
  Jorge Luis Borges
• “Words are symbols for shared memories. If I use a word, then you should have some experience of what the word stands for. If not, the word means nothing to you.”
• 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
• Man’s memory shapes
  Its own Eden within.
• JORGE LUIS BORGES, Dreamtigers
• May Heaven exist, even if my place is Hell.
• JORGE LUIS BORGES, “The Library of Babel”
• 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”
• Fame is a form, perhaps the worst form, of incomprehension.
• JORGE LUIS BORGES, Ficciones
• The heresies we should fear are those which can be confused with orthodoxy.
• JORGE LUIS BORGES, The Theologians
• 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 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
• Time, which despoils castles, enriches verses.
• JORGE LUIS BORGES, “Averroes’ Search”
• 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”
• 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
• Life and death have been lacking in my life.
• JORGE LUIS BORGES, prologue, Discussion
• 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 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”
• Every novel is an ideal plane inserted into the realm of reality.
• JORGE LUIS BORGES, “Partial Magic in the Quixote,” Labyrinths
• 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
• To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god.
• JORGE LUIS BORGES, “The Meeting in a Dream,” Other Inquisitions
• 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, Apr. 1980
• 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
• Jorge Luis Borges quote
• 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
• What man of us has never felt, walking through the twilight or writing down a date from his past, that he has lost something infinite?
• JORGE LUIS BORGES, Dreamtigers
• To die for a religion is easier than to live it absolutely.
• JORGE LUIS BORGES, “Deutsches Requiem,” Labyrinths
• What one man does is something done, in some measure, by all men.
• JORGE LUIS BORGES, “The Form of the Sword,” Ficciones
• There’s no need to build a labyrinth when the entire universe is one.
• JORGE LUIS BORGES, “Ibn-Hakim Al-Bokhari, Murdered in His Labyrinth”
• 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.
• JORGE LUIS BORGES, “A Biography of Tadeo Isidoro Cruz”
• The impossibility of penetrating the divine pattern of the universe cannot stop us from planning human patterns, even though we are conscious they are not definitive.
• JORGE LUIS BORGES, The Analytical Language of John Wilkins
• Poetry always remembers that it was an oral art before it was a written art. It remembers that it was first song.
• JORGE LUIS BORGES, “The Divine Comedy”
• Really, nobody knows whether the world is realistic or fantastic, that is to say, whether the world is a natural process or whether it is a kind of dream, a dream that we may or may not share with others.
• JORGE LUIS BORGES, The Paris Review, winter-spring 1967
• The unicorn, because of its own anomaly, will pass unnoticed. Our eyes see what they are accustomed to seeing.
• JORGE LUIS BORGES, The Modesty of History
• That one individual should awaken in another memories that belong to still a third is an obvious paradox.
• JORGE LUIS BORGES, Evaristo Carriego
• The machinery of the world is far too complex for the simplicity of men.
• JORGE LUIS BORGES, Dreamtigers
• I will pause to consider this eternity from which the subsequent ones derive.
• JORGE LUIS BORGES, “A History of Eternity”
• Myth is at the beginning of literature, and also at its end.
• JORGE LUIS BORGES, “Parable of Cervantes and Don Quixote,” Dreamtigers
• 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.
• JORGE LUIS BORGES, preface, The Garden of Forking Paths
• I foresee that man will resign himself each day to more atrocious undertakings; soon there will be no one but warriors and brigands; I give them this counsel: The author of an atrocious undertaking ought to imagine that he has already accomplished it, ought to impose upon himself a future as irrevocable as the past.
• JORGE LUIS BORGES, “The Garden of Forking Paths”
• Intelligence has little to do with poetry. Poetry springs from something deeper; it’s beyond intelligence. It may not even be linked with wisdom. It’s a thing of its own; it has a nature of its own. Undefinable.
• JORGE LUIS BORGES, The Paris Review, winter-spring 1967
• There is nothing very remarkable about being immortal; with the exception of mankind, all creatures are immortal, for they know nothing of death. What is divine, terrible, and incomprehensible is to know oneself immortal.
• JORGE LUIS BORGES, “The Immortal”
• 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.
• JORGE LUIS BORGES, Brodie’s Report
• When I write, I write because a thing has to be done. I don’t think a writer should meddle too much with his own work. He should let the work write itself.
• JORGE LUIS BORGES, The Paris Review, winter-spring 1967
• Writing is nothing more than a guided dream.
• JORGE LUIS BORGES, preface, Dr. Brodie’s Report
• Heaven and hell seem out of proportion to me: the actions of men do not deserve so much.
• JORGE LUIS BORGES, attributed, Borges Verbal
• My undertaking is not difficult, essentially … I should only have to be immortal to carry it out.
• JORGE LUIS BORGES, The Garden of Forking Paths