The task of art is to transform what is continuously happening to us, to transform all of these things into symbols, into music, into something which can last in man’s memory. That is our duty. If we don’t fulfill it, we feel unhappy.
JORGE LUIS BORGESLet others pride themselves about how many pages they have written; I’d rather boast about the ones I’ve read.
More Jorge Luis Borges Quotes
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The dictionary is based on the hypothesis — obviously an unproven one — that languages are made up of equivalent synonyms.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
What you really value is what you miss, not what you have.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
Every man should be capable of all ideas.
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 -
If I were asked to name the chief event in my life, I should say my father’s library.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
I had always thought of Paradise / In form and image as a library.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
Reality is not always probable, or likely.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
While we are asleep in this world, we are awake in another one.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
In my next life I will try to commit more errors.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
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 Falklands thing was a fight between two bald men over a comb.
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 -
In adultery, there is usually tenderness and self-sacrifice; in murder, courage; in profanation and blasphemy, a certain satanic splendour. Judas elected those offences unvisited by any virtues: abuse of confidence and informing.
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 -
When writers die they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarnation.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
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 -
The minotaur more than justifies the existence of the labyrinth.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
Being an agnostic means all things are possible, even God, even the Holy Trinity. This world is so strange that anything may happen, or may not happen. Being an agnostic makes me live in a larger, a more fantastic kind of world, almost uncanny. It makes me more tolerant.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
Nothing is built on stone; all is built on sand, but we must build as if the sand were stone.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
I think most people are more important than their opinions.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
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.
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 -
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 -
A book is not an isolated being: it is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
Poets, like the blind, can see in the dark.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
A writer – and, I believe, generally all persons – must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource.
JORGE LUIS BORGES