Nothing is built on stone; all is built on sand, but we must build as if the sand were stone.
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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I suppose identity depends on memory. And if my memory is blotted out, then I wonder if I exist – I mean, if I am the same person. Of course, I don’t have to solve that problem. It’s up to God, if any.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
We have stopped believing in progress. What progress that is !
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 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 -
The word happiness exists in every language; it is plausible the thing itself exists.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
So plant your own gardens and decorate your own soul, instead of waiting for someone to bring you flowers.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
Every novel is an ideal plane inserted into the realm of reality.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
Dictatorships foster oppression, dictatorships foster servitude, dictatorships foster cruelty; more abominable is the fact that they foster idiocy.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
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 -
My undertaking is not difficult, essentially. I should only have to be immortal to carry it out.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
Time is the substance from which I am made. Time is a river which carries me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger that devours me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
What a writer wants to do is not what he does.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
We forget that we are all dead men conversing with dead men.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
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 -
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