Only in the present do things happen.
JORGE LUIS BORGESTo 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.
More Jorge Luis Borges Quotes
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The original is unfaithful to the translation.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
Whoever would undertake some atrocious enterprise should act as if it were already accomplished should impose upon himself a future as irrevocable as the past.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
There is no point in being overwhelmed by the appalling total of human sufferring; such a total does not exist. Neither poverty nor pain is accumulable.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
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 -
I walk slowly, like one who comes from so far away he doesn’t expect to arrive.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
We are our memory, we are that chimerical museum of shifting shapes, that pile of broken mirrors.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
When one confesses to an act, one ceases to be an actor in it and becomes its witness, becomes a man that observes and narrates it and no longer the man that performed it.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
Each thing implies the universe.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
Reality is partial to symmetry and slight anachronisms
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
Time is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
The heresies we should fear are those which can be confused with orthodoxy.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
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 -
If I were asked to name the chief event in my life, I should say my father’s library.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
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.
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 -
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.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
When I wake up, I wake to something worse. It’s the astonishment of being myself.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
In general, every country has the language it deserves.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
Death is just infinity closing in.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
Loneliness does not worry me; life is difficult enough, putting up with yourself and with your own habits.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
May Heaven exist, even if my place is Hell.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
The sea is an idiom I cannot decipher.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
A system is nothing more than the subordination of all aspects of the universe to any one of such aspects.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
While we are asleep in this world, we are awake in another one.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
Don’t talk unless you can improve the silence.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
Beyond my anxiety, beyond this writing, the universe waits, inexhaustible, inviting.
JORGE LUIS BORGES