Jorge Luis Borges Quotes

The task of art is to transform what is continuously happening to us, to transform all of these things into symbols, into music, into something which can last in man’s memory. That is our duty. If we don’t fulfill it, we feel unhappy.

I am almost sure to be blotted out by death, but sometimes I think it is not impossible that I may continue to live in some other manner after my physical death . Or, as Hamlet wonders, what dreams will come when we leave this body?

I believe that in time we will have reached the point where we will deserve to be free of government.

The flattery of posterity is not worth much more than contemporary flattery, which is worth nothing.

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.

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.

Time is the tiger that devours me, but I am that tiger.

I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities I have visited.

To arrange a library is to practice in a quiet and modest way the art of criticism.

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.