Quotes from Jorge Luís Borges

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

There are official searchers, inquisitors. I have seen them in the performance of their function: they always arrive extremely tired from their journeys; they speak of a broken stairway which almost killed them; they talk with the librarian of galleries and stairs; sometimes they pick up the nearest volume and leaf through it, looking for infamous words. Obviously, no one expects to discover anything.

The story of two dreams is a coincidence, a line drawn by chance, like the shapes of lions or horses that are sometimes formed by clouds.

Después reflexioné que todas las cosas le suceden a uno precisamente, precisamente ahora. Siglos de siglos y sólo en el presente ocurren los hechos; innumerables hombres en el aire, en la tierra y el mar, y todo lo que realmente pasa me pasa a mí...

The taste of the apple ... lies in the contact of the fruit with the palate, not in the fruit itself; in a similar way ... poetry lies in the meeting of poem and reader, not in the lines of symbols printed on the pages of a book. What is essential is the aesthetic act, the thrill, the almost physical emotion that comes with each reading.

Music, states of happiness, mythology, faces belaboured by time, certain twilights and certain places try to tell us something, or have said something we should have missed, or are about to say something; this imminence of a revelation which does not occur is, perhaps, the aesthetic phenomenon.

I prayed aloud, less to plead for divine favor than to intimidate the tribe with articulate speech.

Before unearthing this letter, I had questioned myself about the ways in which a book can be infinite. I could think of nothing other than a cyclic volume, a circular one. A book whose last page was identical with the first, a book which had the possibility of continuing indefinitely.

Solomon saith: There is no new thing upon the earth. So that as Plato had an imagination, that all knowledge was but remembrance; so Solomon giveth his sentence, that all novelty is but oblivion. Francis Bacon: Essays, LVIII

Historical truth, for him, is not what has happened; it is what we judge to have happened.

Uno no es lo que es por lo que escribe, sino por lo que ha leído.

This has happened and will happen again,' said Euphorbus. 'You are not lighting a pyre, you are lighting a labyrinth of flames. If all the fires I have seen were gathered together here, they would not fit on earth and the angels would be blinded. I have said this many times.' Then he cried out, because the flames had reached him.

Nadie es alguien, un solo hombre inmortal es todos los hombres. Como Cornelio Agrippa, soy dios, soy héroe, soy filósofo, soy demonio y soy mundo, lo cual es una fatigosa manera de decir que no soy.

Mindig azt mondtam a tanítványaimnak, hogy ne csináljanak bibliográfiát, ne olvassanak kritikákat, olvassák magukat a m?veket; lehet, hogy keveset fognak belÅ'lük érteni, de élvezni fogják az olvasást, és mindig hallani fogják valakinek a hangját.

Like every writer, he measured other men's virtues by what they had accomplished, yet asked that other men measure him by what he planned someday to do.

El arte sucede cada vez que leemos un poema.

God is more generous than men and will measure them by a different standard.

Words, displaced and mutilated words, words of others, were the poor pittance left him by the hours and the centuries.

Hay una hora de la tarde en que la llanura está por decir algo; nunca lo dice o tal vez lo dice infinitamente y no lo entendemos, o lo entendemos pero es intraducible, como una música

So witless did these ideas strike me as being, so sweeping and pompous the way they were expressed, that I associated them immediately with literature.

The present is the instant in which the future crumbles into the past.

The critics often invent authors; they select two dissimilar works - the Tao Te Ching and the 1001 Nights, say - attribute them to the same writer and then determine most scrupulously the psychology of this interesting homme de lettres...

Centuries and centuries of idealism have not failed to influence reality

There is a labyrinth which is a straight line.