There is an hour of the afternoon when the plain is on the verge of saying something. It never says, or perhaps it says it infinitely, or perhaps we do not understand it, or we understand it and it is untranslatable as music.
JORGE LUIS BORGESWhoever would undertake some atrocious enterprise should act as if it were already accomplished should impose upon himself a future as irrevocable as the past.
More Jorge Luis Borges Quotes
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I ask of any God, of any gods, that if they give immortality, I hope to be granted oblivion also.
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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 -
I have sometimes suspected that the only thing that holds no mystery is happiness, because it is its own justification.
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 -
The word happiness exists in every language; it is plausible the thing itself exists.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
There’s no need to build a labyrinth when the entire universe is one.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
We accept reality so readily – perhaps because we sense that nothing is real.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
When writers die they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarnation.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
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.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
In general, every country has the language it deserves.
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 saw all the mirrors on earth and none of them reflected me.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
There is no point in being overwhelmed by the appalling total of human sufferring; such a total does not exist. Neither poverty nor pain is accumulable.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
Perhaps the apparent favor of the universe is no more than the crocodile grin of a Doberman breathing hard and about to be hungry?
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
We have a very precise image – an image at times shameless – of what we have lost, but we are ignorant of what may follow or replace it.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
The minotaur more than justifies the existence of the labyrinth.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
Blindness has not been for me a total misfortune; it should not be seen in a pathetic way. It should be seen as a way of life: one of the styles of living.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
While we are asleep in this world, we are awake in another one.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
My books standing there on the shelf do not know that I have written them.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
Every novel is an ideal plane inserted into the realm of reality.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
The original is unfaithful to the translation.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
I think that the reader should enrich what he is reading. He should misunderstand the text; he should change it into something else.
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The possibilities of the art of combination are not infinite, but they tend to be frightful.
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I saw a sunset in Queretaro that seemed to reflect the color of a rose in Bengal.
JORGE LUIS BORGES