Jorge Luis Borges Quotes

A writer – and, I believe, generally all persons – must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource.

If I were asked to name the chief event in my life, I should say my father’s library.

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.

A writer needs loneliness, and he gets his share of it. He needs love, and he gets shared and also unshared love. He needs friendship. In fact, he needs the universe. To be a writer is, in a sense, to be a day-dreamer – to be living a kind of double life.

When I wake up, I wake to something worse. It’s the astonishment of being myself.

Do you want to see what human eyes have never seen? Look at the moon. Do you want to hear what ears have never heard? Listen to the bird’s cry. Do you want to touch what hands have never touched? Touch the earth. Verily I say that God is about to create the world.

When you reach my age, you realize you couldn’t have done things very much better or much worse than you did them in the first place.

Beyond my anxiety, beyond this writing, the universe waits, inexhaustible, inviting.

The tango is a direct expression of something that poets have often tried to state in words: the belief that a fight may be a celebration.

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.