The possibilities of the art of combination are not infinite, but they tend to be frightful.
JORGE LUIS BORGESThere 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.
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 -
The dictionary is based on the hypothesis — obviously an unproven one — that languages are made up of equivalent synonyms.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
Writing long books is a laborious and impoverishing act of foolishness: expanding in five hundred pages an idea that could be perfectly explained in a few minutes. A better procedure is to pretend that those books already exist and to offer a summary, a commentary.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
We are our memory, we are that chimerical museum of shifting shapes, that pile of broken mirrors.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
When I feel I’m going to write something, then I just am quiet and I try to listen. Then something comes through. And I do what I can in order not to tamper with 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 -
In our dreams (writes Coleridge) images represent the sensations we think they cause; we do not feel horror because we are threatened by a sphinx; we dream of a sphinx in order to explain the horror we feel.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
The word happiness exists in every language; it is plausible the thing itself exists.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
The fact is that poetry is not the books in the library. Poetry is the encounter of the reader with the book, the discovery of the book.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
The future is inevitable and precise, but it may not occur. God lurks in the gaps.
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 -
Let others pride themselves about how many pages they have written; I’d rather boast about the ones I’ve read.
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 -
I ask of any God, of any gods, that if they give immortality, I hope to be granted oblivion also.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
Only in the present do things happen.
JORGE LUIS BORGES