I gazed at every mirror on the planet, not one gave back my reflection.
JORGE LUIS BORGESTo die for a religion is easier than to live it absolutely.
More Jorge Luis Borges Quotes
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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 -
For me, beauty is a physical sensation, something we feel with our whole body. It is not the result of judgement. We do not arrive at it by way of rules. We either feel beauty or we don’t.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
Reality favors symmetry.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
Do you want to see what human eyes have never seen? Look at the moon. Do you want to hear what ears have never heard? Listen to the bird’s cry. Do you want to touch what hands have never touched? Touch the earth. Verily I say that God is about to create the world.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
How can we manage to illuminate the pathos of our lives?
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
A writer needs loneliness, and he gets his share of it. He needs love, and he gets shared and also unshared love. He needs friendship. In fact, he needs the universe. To be a writer is, in a sense, to be a day-dreamer – to be living a kind of double life.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
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 -
Many of the characters are fools and they’re always playing tricks on me and treating me badly.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
I have preferred to teach my students not English literature but my love for certain authors, or, even better, certain pages, or even better than that, certain lines. One falls in love with a line, then with a page, then with an author. Well, why not? It is a beautiful process.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
The earth we inhabit is an error, an incompetent parody. Mirrors and paternity are abominable because they multiply and affirm it.
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 -
Art is very mysterious. I wonder if you can really do any damage to art. I think that when we’re writing, something comes through or should come through, in spite of our theories. So theories are not really important.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
In all fiction, when a man is faced with alternatives he chooses one at the expense of others.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
The dictionary is based on the hypothesis — obviously an unproven one — that languages are made up of equivalent synonyms.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
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 -
It means much to have loved, to have been happy, to have laid my hand on the living Garden, even for a day.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
I never reread what I’ve written. I’m far too afraid to feel ashamed of what I’ve done.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
I am almost sure to be blotted out by death, but sometimes I think it is not impossible that I may continue to live in some other manner after my physical death . Or, as Hamlet wonders, what dreams will come when we leave this body?
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
Soccer is popular because stupidity is popular.
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 -
What I’m really concerned about is reaching one person. And that person may be myself for all I know.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
So plant your own gardens and decorate your own soul, instead of waiting for someone to bring you flowers.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
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.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
Writing is nothing more than a guided dream.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
A poet is a discoverer rather than an inventor.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
It’s a shame that we have to choose between two such second-rate countries as the USSR and the USA.
JORGE LUIS BORGES