Quotes from Jorge Luís Borges

I think that the reader should enrich what he is reading. He should misunderstand the text; he should change it into something else.

I thought that a man can be an enemy of other men, of the moments of other men, but not of a country: not of fireflies, words, gardens, streams of water, sunsets.

The Suicide Not a single star will be left in the night. The night will not be left. I will die and, with me, the weight of the intolerable universe. I shall erase the pyramids, the medallions, the continents and faces. I shall erase the accumulated past. I shall make dust of history, dust of dust. Now I am looking on the final sunset. I am hearing the last bird. I bequeath nothingness to no one.

Like all those possessing a library, Aurelian was aware that he was guilty of not knowing his in its entirety.

De qué otra forma se puede amenazar que no sea de muerte? Lo interesante, lo original, sería que alguien lo amenace a uno con la inmortalidad.

The dictionary is based on the hypothesis -- obviously an unproven one -- that languages are made up of equivalent synonyms.

There is an hour of the afternoon when the plain is on the verge of saying something. It never says, or perhaps it says it infinitely, or perhaps we do not understand it, or we understand it and it is untranslatable as music.

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

i walk slowly, like one who comes from so far away he doesn't expect to arrive.

From my weakness, I drew strength that never left me.

Estoy solo y no hay nadie en el espejo.

It only takes two facing mirrors to build a labyrinth.

To think, analyze and invent are not anomalous acts, but the normal respiration of the intelligence.

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.

He was very religious; he believed that he had a secret pact with God which exempted him from doing good in exchange for prayers and piety.

A book is a physical object in a world of physical objects. It is a set of dead symbols. And then the right reader comes along, and the words—or rather the poetry behind the words, for the words themselves are mere symbols—spring to life, and we have a resurrection of the word.

Los espejos y la cópula son abominables, porque multiplican el número de los hombres.

Toda mi vida modifica el libro que estoy leyendo.

Fame is a form - perhaps the worst form - of incomprehension.

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.

Leaving behind the babble of the plaza, I enter the Library. I feel, almost physically, the gravitation of the books, the enveloping serenity of order, time magically dessicated and preserved.

To say good-bye is to deny separation; it is to say Today we play at going our own ways, but we'll see each other tomorrow. Men invented farewells because they somehow knew themselves to be immortal, even while seeing themselves as contingent and ephemeral.

Loneliness does not worry me; life is difficult enough, putting up with yourself and with your own habits.

Paradise will be a kind of library