Quotes from Jorge Luís Borges

What will die with me the day I die? What pathetic or frail image will be lost to the world?

Alejandría, debelada, imploró en vano la misericordia del César

Y el azar, salvo que no hay azar, salvo que lo que llamamos azar es nuestra ignorancia de la compleja maquinaria de la causalidad, el azar me hizo encontrar tres pequeños volúmenes. Yo he debido traer uno como talismán ahora. Tres pequeños en la librería Mitchel que corresponden a tantos recuerdos míos, y esos tres pequeños volúmenes eran los tres tomos de Infierno, el Purgatorio y el Paraíso, vertidos al inglés [...]

Pensar es olvidar diferencias, es generalizar, abstraer. En el abarrotado mundo de Funes no había sino detalles, casi inmediatos.

upa tras perfluyue lunó.

My undertaking is not difficult, essentially. I should only have to be immortal to carry it out.

The indecipherable dust, once Shakespeare.

I know very little of my own work by heart, because I don't like what I write. In fact, I find myself personally expressed far better in the writings of other poets than in my own, because I know all my mistakes—I know all the chinks and all the padding, I know that a particular line is weak, and so on. I read other poets in a different way; I don't look too closely at them.

La muerte (o su alusión) hace preciosos y patéticos a los hombres. Estos conmueven por su condición de fantasmas; cada acto que ejecutan puede ser último; no hay rostro que no esté por desdibujarse como el rostro de un sueño. Todo entre los mortales tiene el valor de lo irrecuperable y de lo azaroso.

Azevedo Bandeira is an expert in the art of progressive intimidation, in the satanic maneuver of gradually humiliating his interlocutor by combining verities and gibes.

Desvario laborioso e empobrecedor é o de compor vastos livros; o de espraiar por quinhentas páginas uma ideia cuja perfeita exposição oral cabe em poucos minutos.

When I began writing I always said to myself that my ideas were very shallow-- that if a reader saw through them, he would despise me. So I disguised myself.

When the clocks of midnight squander a generous time, I will go further than Ulysses' oarsmen to the realm of dreams, inaccessible to human nature. From that underwater region, I rescue fragments that I do not begin to understand.

WÄ…tpliwe, aby Å›wiat miaÅ' sens; jeszcze bardziej wÄ…tpliwe, aby miaÅ' sens podwójny lub potrójny, zauwa?y niedowiarek. Ja sÄ…dzÄ™, ?e tak wÅ'aÅ›nie jest; (...).

If the characters of a fictional work can be readers or spectators, we, its readers or spectators, can be fictions.

In the depths of the siesta amorous doves called huskily;

non si può misurare il tempo in giorni come si misura il denaro in centesimi o in pesos, perché i pesos sono tutti uguali mentre ogni giorno è diverso e forse anche ogni ora.

Dijo Tennyson que si pudiéramos comprender una sola flor sabríamos quiénes somos, y qué es el mundo. Tal vez quiso decir que no hay hecho, por humilde que sea, que no implique la historia universal y su infinita concatenación de efectos y causas.

Every so many years, he went to England to visit—judging by the photographs he showed us—a sundial and some oak trees.

My father and he had cemented (the verb is excessive) one of those English friendships which begin by avoiding intimacies and eventually eliminate speech altogether. They used to exchange books and periodicals; they would beat one another at chess, without saying a word.

Pokušao bih uvijek imati lijepe trenutke, Jer se jedino od toga sastoji život, od trenutaka. Kada bih se mogao vratiti unatrag, borio bih se da nikada ne izgubim sada

No mostré a nadie mi tesoro. A la dicha de poseerlo se agregó el temor de que lo robaran

Algunos moralistas razonaron que la posesión de monedas no siempre determina la felicidad y que otras formas de la dicha son quizá más directas.

S? modifici trecutul nu înseamn? s? modifici un singur fapt, ci s?-i anulezi consecinÈ›ele, care tind s? fie infinite. Cu alte cuvinte, am putea spune c? înseamn? s? creezi dou? istorii universale.