Quotes from Jorge Luís Borges

Only that which is gone belongs to us.

Let others brag about the pages they have written; I'm proud of those I've read.

Let each one build their own cathedral. Why live from alien and ancient works of art?

One must choose one's enemies carefully, as one ends up resembling them.

I think nowadays, while literary men seem to have neglected their epic duties, the epic has been saved for us, strangely enough, by the Westerns.

Man's memory shapes Its own Eden within.

Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire.

May Heaven exist, even if my place is Hell.

As I think of the many myths, there is one that is very harmful, and that is the myth of countries. I mean, why should I think of myself as being an Argentine, and not a Chilean, and not an Uruguayan. I don't know really. All of those myths that we impose on ourselves -- and they make for hatred, for war, for enmity -- are very harmful. Well, I suppose in the long run, governments and countries will die out and we'll be just, well, cosmopolitans.

We feel poetry as we feel the closeness of a woman, or as we feel a mountain or a bay. If we feel it immediately, why dilute it with other words, which no doubt will be weaker than our feelings?

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.

The heresies we should fear are those which can be confused with orthodoxy.

The things that are said in literature are always the same. What is important is the way they are said.

Time, which despoils castles, enriches verses.

I know of one semibarbarous zone whose librarians repudiate the "vain and superstitious habit" of trying to find sense in books, equating such a quest with attempting to find meaning in dreams or in the chaotic lines on the palms of one's hand.

This happy conjecture affirmed that there is only one subject, that this indivisible subject is every being in the universe and that these beings are the organs and masks of the divinity.

Life and death have been lacking in my life.

Don't talk unless you can improve the silence.

Let others pride themselves about how many pages they have written; I'd rather boast about the ones I've read.

Patio, heaven's watercourse.The patio is the slopedown which the sky flows into the house.Serenelyeternity waits at the crossway of the stars.

A man gradually identifies himself with the form of his fate; a man is, in the long run, his own circumstances.

Poetry remembers that it was an oral art before it was a written art.

Little by little I came to realize the strange irony of events. I had always imagined Paradise as a kind of library. Others think of a garden or of a palace. There I was, the center, in a way, of nine hundred thousand books in various languages, but I found I could barely make out the title pages and the spines.

The Falklands thing was a fight between two bald men over a comb.