Quotes from Jorge Luís Borges

The machinery of the world is far too complex for the simplicity of men.

The task of art is to transform what is continuously happening to us, to transform all of these things into symbols, into music, into something which can last in man's memory. That is our duty. If we don't fulfill it, we feel unhappy.

Mirrors and copulation are abominable, since they both multiply the numbers of men.

It may be that universal history is the history of the different intonations given a handful of metaphors.

We have shared out, like thieves, the amazing treasures of days and nights.

With relief, with humiliation, with terror, he understood that he too was a mere appearance, dreamt by another.

There is no need to build a labyrinth when the entire universe is one.

O verbo ler, como o verbo amar e o verbo sonhar, não suporta o modo imperativo. Eu aconselho sempre os meus alunos que se um livro os aborrece o abandonem; que não o leiam porque é famoso, que não o leiam porque é moderno, que não o leiam porque é um clássico. A leitura deve ser uma das formas da felicidade e não se pode obrigar ninguém a ser feliz.

We are as ignorant of the meaning of the dragon as we are of the meaning of the universe.

The library will endure; it is the universe. As for us, everything has not been written; we are not turning into phantoms. We walk the corridors, searching the shelves and rearranging them, looking for lines of meaning amid leagues of cacophony and incoherence, reading the history of the past and our future, collecting our thoughts and collecting the thoughts of others, and every so often glimpsing mirrors, in which we may recognize creatures of the information.

The years go by, and I've told the story so many times that I'm not sure anymore whether I actually remember it or whether I just remember the words I tell it with.

The certainty that everything has already been written annuls us, or renders us phantasmal.

La duda es uno de los nombres de la inteligencia.

Happy are the beloved and the lovers and those who can live without love.

It is a laborious madness and an impoverishing one, the madness of composing vast books - setting out in five hundred pages an idea that can be perfectly related orally in five minutes. The better way to go about it is to pretend that those books already exist, and offer a summary, a commentary on them. (From the Introduction of 1941's The Garden of Forking Paths)

Tu ausencia me rodea como la cuerda a la garganta, el mar al que se hunde.

Si me quieren buscar, búsquenme en los libros. No los lean, por favor, si no obtienen placer.

He measured the achievements of others by what they had accomplished, asking of them that they measure him by what he envisaged or planned.

I have always imagined that Paradise will be some kind of library.

Que el cielo exista, aunque mi lugar sea el infierno.

Every man should be capable of all ideas, and I believe that in the future he will be.

He consorted with prostitutes and poets...and with persons even worse.

Time forks perpetually toward innumerable futures. In one of them I am your enemy.

We are our memory, we are that chimerical museum of shifting shapes, that pile of broken mirrors.