Quotes from Jorge Luís Borges

Don't talk unless you can improve the silence.

Nothing is built on stone; all is built on sand, but we must build as if the sand were stone.

Reality may avoid the obligation to be interesting, but ... hypotheses may not.

We have stopped believing in progress. What progress that is !

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

In my next life I will try to commit more errors.

Any life, however long and complicated it may be, actually consists of a single moment — the moment when a man knows forever more who he is.

If I were asked to name the chief event in my life, I should say my father's library.

Time is the substance from which I am made. Time is a river which carries me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger that devours me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire.

The central problem of novel-writing is causality.

There is a concept that is the corrupter and destroyer of all others. I speak not of Evil, whose limited empire is that of ethics; I speak of the infinite.

One concept corrupts and confuses the others. I am not speaking of the Evil whose limited sphere is ethics; I am speaking of the infinite.

Life and death have been lacking in my life.

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

His life, measured in space and time, will take up a mere few lines, which my ignorance will abbreviate further.

I have always come to life after coming to books.

Thus my life is a flight and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to him.

In general, every country has the language it deserves.

I cannot walk through the suburbs in the solitude of the night without thinking that the night pleases us because it suppresses idle details, just as our memory does.

Being with you and not being with you is the only way I have to measure time.

If space is infinite, we may be at any point in space. If time is infinite, we may be at any point in time.

Blindness has not been for me a total misfortune; it should not be seen in a pathetic way. It should be seen as a way of life: one of the styles of living.

Imprecision is tolerable and verisimilar in literature, because we always tend towards it in life.

Reality is not always probable, or likely.