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 BORGESA 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.
More Jorge Luis Borges Quotes
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The flattery of posterity is not worth much more than contemporary flattery, which is worth nothing.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
In Spanish it is very difficult to make things flow, because words are over-long. But in English, you have light words.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
He thought that the rose was to be found in its own eternity and not in his words; and that we may mention or allude to a thing, but not express it.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
The visible universe was an illusion or, more precisely, a sophism. Mirrors and fatherhood are abominable because they multiply it and extend it.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
Don’t talk unless you can improve the silence.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
If space is infinite, we may be at any point in space. If time is infinite, we may be at any point in time.
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 -
He consorted with prostitutes and poets and with persons even worse.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
What a writer wants to do is not what he does.
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 -
My undertaking is not difficult, essentially. I should only have to be immortal to carry it out.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
The future has no other reality than as present hope, and the past is no more than present memory.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
The mightiest love was granted him Love that does not expect to be loved.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
Many of the characters are fools and they’re always playing tricks on me and treating me badly.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
Then I reflect that all things happen, happen to one, precisely now. Century follows century, and things happen only in the present. There are countless men in the air, on land and at sea, and all that really happens happens to me.
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 -
The word happiness exists in every language; it is plausible the thing itself exists.
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 -
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 -
I am not sure of anything, I know nothing. Can you imagine that I don’t even know the date of my own death?
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 -
I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
It also occurred to him that throughout history, humankind has told two stories: the story of a lost ship sailing the Mediterranean seas in quest of a beloved isle, and the story of a god who allows himself to be crucified on Golgotha.
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 -
A writer’s work is the product of laziness.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
What will die with me when I die, what pathetic or fragile form will the world lose?
JORGE LUIS BORGES