Quotes from Jorge Luís Borges

Para escrever bem — acredito com firmeza —, é preciso ser discreto.

Como instrumento de investigación filosófica, la máquina de pensar es absurda. No lo sería, en cambio, como instrumento literario y poético.

No one is anyone, one single immortal man is all men. Like Cornelius Agrippa, I am god, I am hero, I am philosopher, I am demon and I am world, which is a tedious way of saying that I do not exist.

You who read me, are You sure of understanding my language?

Music, feelings of happiness, mythology, faces worn by time, certain twilights and certain places, want to tell us something, or they told us something that we should not have missed, or they are about to tell us something; this imminence of a revelation that is not produced is, perhaps, 'the aesthetic event'.

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.

Besides, rereading, not reading, is what counts.

Writing long books is a laborious and impoverishing act of foolishness: expanding in five hundred pages an idea that could be perfectly explained in a few minutes. A better procedure is to pretend that those books already exist and to offer a summary, a commentary.

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.

Sometimes, looking at the many books I have at home, I feel I shall die before I come to the end of them, yet I cannot resist the temptation of buying new books. Whenever I walk into a bookstore and find a book on one of my hobbies — for example, Old English or Old Norse poetry — I say to myself, "What a pity I can't buy that book, for I already have a copy at home.

I have no way of knowing whether the events that I am about to narrate are effects or causes.

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.

There are those who seek the love of a woman to forget her, to not think about her.

Of all man's instruments, the most wondrous, no doubt, is the book. The other instruments are extensions of his body. The microscope, the telescope, are extensions of his sight; the telephone is the extension of his voice; then we have the plow and the sword, extensions of the arm. But the book is something else altogether: the book is an extension of memory and imagination.

What man of us has never felt, walking through the twilight or writing down a date from his past, that he has lost something infinite?

Que otros se jacten de las páginas que han escrito; a mí me enorgullecen las que he leído.

Whatever one man does, it is as if all men did it. For that reason, it is not unfair that one disobedience in a garden should contaminate all humanity; for that reason it is not unjust that the crucifixion of a single Jew should be sufficient to save it.

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

We accept reality so readily - perhaps because we sense that nothing is real.

I saw all the mirrors on earth and none of them reflected me...

Hay quienes no pueden imaginar un mundo sin pájaros; hay quienes no pueden imaginar un mundo sin agua; en lo que a mi se refiere, soy incapaz de imaginar un mundo sin libros. There are those who cannot imagine a world without birds; there are those who cannot imagine a world without water; but in my case I am unable to imagine a world without books.

Man's memory shapes Its own Eden within

A book is not an isolated being: it is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships

I...have always known that my destiny was, above all, a literary destiny — that bad things and some good things would happen to me, but that, in the long run, all of it would be converted into words. Particularly the bad things, since happiness does not need to be transformed: happiness is its own end.