Jorge Luis Borges famous quotes

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

#Inspirational #Motivational #Birthday

When I write, I do it urged by an intimate necessity. I don't have in mind an exclusive public, or a public of multitudes, I don't think in either thing. I think about expressing what I want to say. I try to do it in the simplest way possible.
-- Jorge Luis Borges

#Writing #Thinking #Mind

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.
-- Jorge Luis Borges

#Book #Discovery #Library

I cannot sleep unless I am surrounded by books.
-- Jorge Luis Borges

#Book #Reading #Sleep

Soccer is popular because stupidity is popular.
-- Jorge Luis Borges

#Soccer #Stupidity

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

#Love #Life #Time

Nothing is built on stone; all is built on sand, but we must build as if the sand were stone.
-- Jorge Luis Borges

#Stones #Sand

A writer's work is the product of laziness.
-- Jorge Luis Borges

#Writing #Laziness

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

#Single Mom #Men #Life Is

La duda es uno de los nombres de la inteligencia.
-- Jorge Luis Borges

#Doubt

Life itself is a quotation.
-- Jorge Luis Borges

#Inspirational #Life #Book

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

#Book #Incarnation

Don't talk unless you can improve the silence.
-- Jorge Luis Borges

#Inspirational #Leadership #Communication

I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.
-- Jorge Luis Borges

#Nature #Reading #Book

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

#Life #Cities #People

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

#Pride #Pages #Boast

He consorted with prostitutes and poets...and with persons even worse.
-- Jorge Luis Borges

#Poet #Persons

Writing is nothing more than a guided dream.
-- Jorge Luis Borges

#Dream #Writing

Besides, rereading, not reading, is what counts.
-- Jorge Luis Borges

#Reading #Rereading

To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god.
-- Jorge Luis Borges

#Love #Falling In Love #Fall

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

#Writing #Language #Made

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

#Men #Long #Forever

Poetry springs from something deeper; it's beyond intelligence.
-- Jorge Luis Borges

#Spring #Deeper

The exercise of letters is sometimes linked to the ambition to contruct an absolute book, a book of books that includes the otherslike a Platonic archetype, an object whose virtues are not diminished by the passage of time.
-- Jorge Luis Borges

#Book #Ambition #Exercise

Sometimes, looking at the many books I have at home, I feel I shall die before I come to the end of them, yet I cannot resist the temptation of buying new books. Whenever I walk into a bookstore and find a book on one of my hobbies — for example, Old English or Old Norse poetry — I say to myself, “What a pity I can’t buy that book, for I already have a copy at home.
-- Jorge Luis Borges

#Book #Home #Temptation

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

#Book #Writing #Criticism

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.
-- Jorge Luis Borges

#Afternoon #Hours

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.
-- Jorge Luis Borges

#Writing #Simple #Earth

The mind was dreaming. The world was its dream.
-- Jorge Luis Borges

#Dream #Mind #World

I saw all the mirrors on earth and none of them reflected me.
-- Jorge Luis Borges

#Mirrors #Earth #Saws

If I were asked to name the chief event in my life, I should say my father's library,
-- Jorge Luis Borges

#Father #Names #Library

Literature is not exhaustible, for the sufficient and simple reason that a single book is not.
-- Jorge Luis Borges

#Book #Simple #Literature

What a writer wants to do is not what he does.
-- Jorge Luis Borges

#Writing #Doe #Want

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.
-- Jorge Luis Borges

#Men #Truth Is #Immortal

Reality is not always probable, or likely.
-- Jorge Luis Borges

#Life #Reality

A writer should have another lifetime to see if he's appreciated.
-- Jorge Luis Borges

#Writing #Appreciated #Lifetime

In general, every country has the language it deserves.
-- Jorge Luis Borges

#Country #Language #Deserve

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.
-- Jorge Luis Borges

#Memories #Night #Thinking

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

#Men #New Day #Soldier

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.
-- Jorge Luis Borges

#Life #Time #Fire

A book is a physical object in a world of physical objects. It is a set of dead symbols. And then the right reader comes along, and the words—or rather the poetry behind the words, for the words themselves are mere symbols—spring to life, and we have a resurrection of the word.
-- Jorge Luis Borges

#Spring #Book #World

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.
-- Jorge Luis Borges

#Art #Clay #Raw Materials

Poets, like the blind, can see in the dark.
-- Jorge Luis Borges

#Dark #Blind #Poet

I...have always known that my destiny was, above all, a literary destiny — that bad things and some good things would happen to me, but that, in the long run, all of it would be converted into words. Particularly the bad things, since happiness does not need to be transformed: happiness is its own end.
-- Jorge Luis Borges

#Running #Destiny #Long

Emma dropped the paper. Her first impression was of a weak feeling in her stomach and in her knees; then of blind guilt, of unreality, of coldness, of fear; then she wished that it were already the next day. Immediately afterwards she realized that that wish was futile because the death of her father was the only thing that had happened in the world, and it would go on happening endlessly.
-- Jorge Luis Borges

#Father #Feelings #First Impression

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.
-- Jorge Luis Borges

#Eight #Two #Twelve

Music, 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 aesthetic event'.
-- Jorge Luis Borges

#Twilight #Feelings #Faces

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.
-- Jorge Luis Borges

#Song #Art #Voice

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

#Inspirational #Loneliness #Heart

The original is unfaithful to the translation.
-- Jorge Luis Borges

#Originality #Unfaithful #Translations

Any life, no matter how long and complex it may be, is made up of a single moment-the moment in which a man finds out, once and for all, who he is." "Any life, no matter how long and complex it may be, is made up of a single moment-the moment in which a man finds out, once and for all, who he is.
-- Jorge Luis Borges

#Inspirational Life #Single Mom #Men

Man's memory shapes Its own Eden within
-- Jorge Luis Borges

#Memories #Men

The future is inevitable and precise, but it may not occur. God lurks in the gaps.
-- Jorge Luis Borges

#May #Gaps #Inevitable

I have committed the worst of sins one can commit... I have not been happy.
-- Jorge Luis Borges

#Sin #Worst #Committed

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

#Facts #Oppression #Cruelty

I do not write for a select minority, which means nothing to me, nor for that adulated platonic entity known as ‘The Masses’. Both abstractions, so dear to the demagogue, I disbelieve in. I write for myself and for my friends, and I write to ease the passing of time.
-- Jorge Luis Borges

#Mean #Writing #Minorities

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

#Book #Axes #Isolated

From my weakness, I drew strength that never left me.
-- Jorge Luis Borges

#Healing #Weakness

The time for your labor has been granted.
-- Jorge Luis Borges

#Time #Granted #Labor

The mightiest love was granted him Love that does not expect to be loved.
-- Jorge Luis Borges

#Life #Doe #Granted

Translations are a partial and precious documentation of the changes the text suffers.
-- Jorge Luis Borges

#Suffering #Documentation #Language

Many of the characters are fools and they're always playing tricks on me and treating me badly.
-- Jorge Luis Borges

#Character #Fool #Tricks

Poetry remembers that it was an oral art before it was a written art.
-- Jorge Luis Borges

#Art #Remember

Of all man’s instruments, the most wondrous, no doubt, is the book. The other instruments are extensions of his body. The microscope, the telescope, are extensions of his sight; the telephone is the extension of his voice; then we have the plow and the sword, extensions of the arm. But the book is something else altogether: the book is an extension of memory and imagination.
-- Jorge Luis Borges

#Memories #Book #Men

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

#Men #Heaven #Action

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

#Should #Difficult #Immortal

If space is infinite, we may be at any point in space. If time is infinite, we may be at any point in time.
-- Jorge Luis Borges

#Space #May #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.
-- Jorge Luis Borges

#Book #Writing #Ideas

To die for a religion is easier than to live it absolutely.
-- Jorge Luis Borges

#Religion #Easier

Only in the present do things happen.
-- Jorge Luis Borges

#Things Happen

Reading is an activity subsequent to writing: more resigned, more civil, more intellectual.
-- Jorge Luis Borges

#Hippie #Reading #Writing

Every novel is an ideal plane inserted into the realm of reality.
-- Jorge Luis Borges

#Reality #Planes #Novel

May Heaven exist, even if my place is Hell.
-- Jorge Luis Borges

#Heaven #May #Hell

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.
-- Jorge Luis Borges

#Dream #Lying #Sleep