Jorge Luis Borges's Quotes

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

Writing is nothing more than a guided dream.

Like all writers, he measured the achievements of others by what they had accomplished, asking of them that they measure him by what he envisaged or planned.

In the order of literature, as in others, there is no act that is not the coronation of an infinite series of causes and the source of an infinite series of effects.

There is a concept that is the corrupter and destroyer of all others. I speak not of Evil, whose limited empire is that of ethics; I speak of the infinite.

To be immortal is commonplace; except for man, all creatures are immortal, for they are ignorant of death; what is divine, terrible, incomprehensible, is to know that one is immortal.

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

I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.

Life itself is a quotation.

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.

To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god.

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

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.

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

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

In general, every country has the language it deserves.

Democracy is an abuse of statistics.

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.

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

Reality is not always probable, or likely.

Poetry remembers that it was an oral art before it was a written art.

The original is unfaithful to the translation.

Art always opts for the individual, the concrete; art is not Platonic.

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

Reading is an activity subsequent to writing: more resigned, more civil, more intellectual.

The flattery of posterity is not worth much more than contemporary flattery, which is worth nothing.