My books standing there on the shelf do not know that I have written them.
JORGE LUIS BORGESI might accept immortality, if I had to do it. But I would prefer – if there is any afterlife – to know nothing whatever about Borges, about his experiences in this world.
More Jorge Luis Borges Quotes
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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.
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Thus my life is a flight and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to him.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
We have stopped believing in progress. What progress that is !
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 -
I think most people are more important than their opinions.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
Don’t talk unless you can improve the silence.
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 -
Heaven and hell seem out of proportion to me: the actions of men do not deserve so much.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
Each thing implies the universe.
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There is nothing in the world that is not mysterious, but the mystery is more evident in certain things than in others: in the sea, in the eyes of the elders, in the color yellow, and in music.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
The original is unfaithful to the translation.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
You can’t measure time by days, the way you measure money by dollars and cents, because dollars are all the same while every day is different and maybe every hour as well.
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 -
How can we manage to illuminate the pathos of our lives?
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
Many of the characters are fools and they’re always playing tricks on me and treating me badly.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
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 BORGES -
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.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
What will die with me when I die, what pathetic or fragile form will the world lose?
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
I saw a sunset in Queretaro that seemed to reflect the color of a rose in Bengal.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
Censorship is the mother of metaphor.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
Reality may avoid the obligation to be interesting, but hypotheses may not.
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 -
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 -
Nothing is built on stone; all is built on sand, but we must build as if the sand were stone.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
Reality favors symmetry.
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