Quotes from Jorge Luís Borges

I would rather like to think of God as being a kind of adventurer - even as Wells thought about him - or perhaps as something within us making for some unknown purpose.

Let neither tear nor reproach besmirch this declaration of the mastery of God who, with magnificent irony, granted me both the gift of books and the night.

God must not engage in theology. The writer must not destroy by human reasonings the faith that art requires of us.

To bless thine enemy is a good way to satisfy thy vanity.

I have sometimes suspected that the only thing that holds no mystery is happiness, because it is its own justification.

The word happiness exists in every language; it is plausible the thing itself exists.

Only in the present do things happen.

The future has no other reality than as present hope, and the past is no more than present memory.

I ask of any God, of any gods, that if they give immortality, I hope to be granted oblivion also.

Captivated by its discipline, humanity forgets and goes on forgetting that it is the discipline of chess players, not of angels.

Reality is not always probable, or likely. But if you're writing a story, you have to make it as plausible as you can, because if not, the reader's imagination will reject it.

All theories are legitimate, no matter. What matters is what you do with them.

The worst labyrinth is not that intricate form that can entrap us forever, but a single and precise straight line

I can give you my loneliness, my darkness, the hunger of my heart, I am trying to bribe you with uncertainty, with danger, with defeat.

Dictatorships foster oppression, dictatorships foster servitude, dictatorships foster cruelty; more abominable is the fact that they foster idiocy.

Life itself is a quotation.

Time is the substance of which we are made

To arrange a library is to practice in a quiet and modest way the art of criticism.

There is a concept which corrupts and upsets all others. I refer not to Evil, whose limited realm is that of ethics; I refer to the infinite.

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 not an isolated being: it is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships

Poetry springs from something deeper; it's beyond intelligence.

To die for a religion is easier than to live it absolutely.

It is clear that there is no classification of the Universe that is not arbitrary and full of conjectures. The reason for this is very simple: we do not know what kind of thing the universe is.