Quotes from Jorge Luís Borges

Orice destin, oricât de lung sau de complicat ar fi, se reduce de fapt la un unic moment: momentul în care omul înÅ£elege pentru totdeauna cine este.

Llegué a abominar de mi cuerpo, llegué a sentir que dos ojos, dos manos, dos pulmones, son tan monstruosos como dos caras.

Algo de sacerdote había en él y también de marino.

Que muera conmigo el misterio que está escrito en los tigres. Quien ha entrevisto el universo, quien ha entrevisto los ardientes designios del universo, no puede pensar en un hombre, en sus triviales dichas o desventuras, aunque ese hombre sea él

La historia era increíble, en efecto, pero se impuso a todos, porque sustancialmente era cierta. Verdadero era el tono de Emma Zunz, verdadero el pudor, verdadero el odio. Verdadero también era el ultraje que había padecido; sólo eran falsas las circunstancias, la hora y uno o dos nombres propios.

Sólo perduran en el tiempo las cosas Que no fueron del tiempo.

I'm sorry to say that people have written fifty or sixty books about me. I haven't read a single one of them, since I know too much of the subject, and I'm sick and tired of it.

Así, toda negligencia es deliberada, todo casual encuentro una cita, toda humillación una penitencia, todo fracaso una misteriosa victoria, toda muerte un suicidio.

If you sell, say, two thousand copies, it is the same thing as if you had sold nothing at all because two thousand is too vast—I mean, for the imagination to grasp. While thirty-seven people—perhaps thirty-seven are too many, perhaps seventeen would have been better or even seven—but still thirty-seven are still within the scope of one's imagination.

Since then my loneliness does not pain me, because I know my redeemer lives and he will finally rise above the dust.

It's enough that if I am rich in anything, it is in perplexities rather then in certaintes.

Depois refleti que todas as coisas nos acontecem precisamente, precisamente agora. Séculos de séculos e apenas no presente ocorrem os fatos; inumeráveis homens no ar, na terra e mar, e tudo o que realmente sucede, sucede a mim...

Work that endures is always capable of an infinite and plastic ambiguity; it is all things for all men, like the Apostle; it is a mirror that reflects the reader's own features and it is also a map of the world. Moreover, all this must come about in an evanescent and modest way, almost in spite of the author, who must appear to be ignorant of any and all symbolism.

To be not a man, but the projection of another man's dream- what incomparable humiliation, what vertigo!

We (the indivisible divinity that works in us) have dreamed the world. We have dreamed it resistant, mysterious, visible, ubiquitous in space and firm in time, but we have allowed slight, and eternal, bits of the irrational to form part of its architecture so as to know that it is false.

Gradualmente, el enigma concreto que me atareaba me inquietó menos que el enigma genérico de una sentencia escrita por un dios. ¿Qué tipo de sentencia (me pregunté) construirá una mente absoluta? Consideré que aun en los lenguajes humanos no hay proposición que no implique el universo entero…

He was the solitary lucid spectator of a multiform, momentaneous, and almost unbearably precise world.

Aquí nos encontramos al fin y lo que antes ocurrió no tiene sentido.

It only takes two facing mirrors to construct a labyrinth. from "Nightmares

What eternity is to time, the Aleph is to space.

Un hombre se confunde, gradualmente, con la firma de su destino; un hombre es, a la larga, sus circunstancias.

Todo el mundo sabe dónde encontrar la poesía. Y, cuando aparece, uno siente el roce de la poesía, ese especial estremecimiento.

The two projects I have indicated (an infinite vocabulary for the natural series of numbers, and a usable mental catalogue of all the images of memory) are lacking in sense, but they reveal a certain stammering greatness. They allow us to make out dimly, or to infer, the dizzying world of Funes

But if a book is tedious to you, don't read it; that book was not written for you. Reading should be a form of happiness