Quotes from Jorge Luís Borges

La lectura debe ser una de las formas de la felicidad y no se puede obligar a nadie a ser feliz.

In the dream of the man that dreamed, the dreamed one awoke.

The exchange of thoughts is a condition necessary for all love, all friendship and all real dialogue. Two men who can speak together can enrich and broaden themselves indefinitely.

One is allowed to change the past: the present is so stubborn.

The famed author Robert Lewis Stevenson declared that he'd trained his Brownies to be writers. As he slept, they would whisper fantastic plots in his ear -- for example, the strange case of Dr. Jekyll and the diabolical Mr. Hyde, and that episode in Olalla when a young man from an old Spanish family bites his sister's hand.

Patriotism, that least discerning of passions. - The Shape of the Sword

Ts'ui Pe must have said once: I am withdrawing to write a book. And another time: I am withdrawing to construct a labyrinth. Every one imagined two works; to no one did it occur that the book and the maze were one and the same thing.

I clarified that I myself was Colombian. What is 'being Colombian'? I'm not sure, I replied. It's an act of faith. Like being Norwegian, she said, nodding. I can recall nothing further of what was said that night.

Your unforgivable sins do not allow you to see my splendor.

Time is the thing I am made of. Time is a river that sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger that tears me apart, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire. The world, unfortunately, is real; I, unfortunately, am Borges.

Halfway through his reclusion, Arredondo experienced more than once that almost timeless time. In the first of the house's three patios there was cistern with a frog in it. It never occurred to Arredondo to think that the frog's time, which borders on eternity, was what he himself sought.

Poets, like the blind, can see in the dark.

One of the habits of the mind is the invention of horrible imaginings. - The Total Library

Nadie puede leer dos mil libros. En los cuatro siglos que vivo no habré pasado de una media docena. Además no importa leer sino releer. La imprenta, ahora abolida, ha sido uno de los peores males del hombre, ya que tendió a multiplicar hasta el vértigo textos innecesarios.

El problema no es que mientas. El problema es que te creo

Day and night, their frail and crippled ships defy the tempest.

I do not know whether music knows how to despair over music, or marble over marble, but literature is an art which knows how to prophesize the time in which it might have fallen silent, how to attack its own virtue, and how to fall in love with its own dissolution and court its own end.

The I feel a contentment in defeat, I reflected, simply because defeat has come, because it is infinitely connected to all the acts that are, that were, and that shall be, because to censure or deplore a single real act is to blaspheme against the universe.

I, that used to figure Paradise In the guise of a library

All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.

All language is a set of symbols whose use among its speakers assumes a shared past. How, then, can I translate into words the limitless Aleph, which my floundering mind can scarcely encompass?

I carried out my plan because I felt The Chief had some fear of those of my race, of those uncountable forebears whose culmination lies in me. I wished to prove to him that a yellow man could save his armies.

We spend our lives waiting for our book and it never comes.

Creo que la primera lectura es la verdadera, y que en las siguientes nos engañamos a nosotros mismos con la creencia de que se repite la sensación, la impresión.