Everything touches everything.
JORGE LUIS BORGESAll 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.
More Jorge Luis Borges Quotes
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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 -
Thus my life is a flight and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to him.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
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 -
When I wake up, I wake to something worse. It’s the astonishment of being myself.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
The man who acquires an encyclopedia does not thereby acquire every line, every paragraph, every page, and every illustration; he acquires the possibility of becoming familiar with one and another of those things.
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 -
The worst labyrinth is not that intricate form that can entrap us forever, but a single and precise straight line.
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 -
Another school declares that all time has already transpired and that our life is only the crepuscular and no doubt falsified and mutilated memory or reflection of an irrecoverable process.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
What will die with me when I die, what pathetic or fragile form will the world lose?
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
I have committed the worst of sins one can commit. I have not been happy.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
Dictatorships foster oppression, dictatorships foster servitude, dictatorships foster cruelty; more abominable is the fact that they foster idiocy.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
Truth never penetrates an unwilling mind.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
I believe books will never disappear. It is impossible for it to happen. Of all man’s diverse tools, undoubtedly the most astounding are his books… If books were to disappear, history would disappear. So would man.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
The sea is an idiom I cannot decipher.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
The things that are said in literature are always the same. What is important is the way they are said.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
To arrange a library is to practice in a quiet and modest way the art of criticism.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
To say good-bye is to deny separation; it is to say Today we play at going our own ways, but we’ll see each other tomorrow. Men invented farewells because they somehow knew themselves to be immortal, even while seeing themselves as contingent and ephemeral.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
The mind was dreaming. The world was its dream.
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 -
I never reread what I’ve written. I’m far too afraid to feel ashamed of what I’ve done.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
While we are asleep in this world, we are awake in another one.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
Films are even stranger, for what we are seeing are not disguised people but photographs of disguised people, and yet we believe them while the film is being shown.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
I believe that in time we will have reached the point where we will deserve to be free of government.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
What a writer wants to do is not what he does.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
Time is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire.
JORGE LUIS BORGES