Quotes from Jorge Luís Borges

This web of time – the strands of which approach one another, bifurcate, intersect or ignore each other through the centuries – embraces every possibility. We do not exist in most of them. In some you exist and not I, while in others I do, and you do not.

The truth is that we all live by leaving behind; no doubt we all profoundly know that we are immortal and that sooner or later every man will do all things and know everything.

A necessary monster.

Every cultivated man is a theologian, and faith is not a requisite.

We are ignorant of the meaning of the dragon in the same way that we are ignorant of the meaning of the universe; but there is something in the dragon's image that fits man's imagination, and this accounts for the dragon's appearance in different places and periods.

Blind to all fault, destiny can be ruthless at one's slightest distraction.

What is a book? A book seems, like a picture, to be a living being; and yet if we ask it something, it does not answer. Then we see that it is dead.In order to make the book into a living thing, he invented—happily for us—the Platonic dialogue, which forestalls the reader's doubts and questions.

Time is living me.

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

A la realidad le gustan las simetrías y los leves anacronismos

Bana ayn? anda hem 800,000 kitab? hem de karanl??? veren Tanr?'n?n muhte?em ironisi

I am god, I am hero, I am philosopher, I am demon and I am world, which is a tedious way of saying that I do not exist.

Every novel is an ideal plane inserted into the realm of reality.

zaman beni sürükleyen bir nehir, ama nehir benim; beni parçalayan bir kaplan, ama kaplan benim; beni tüketen bir ateÅŸ, ama ateÅŸ benim; evren, ne yaz?k ki gerçek; ben, ne yaz?k ki, borges'im

But let no one imagine that we were mere ascetics. There is no more complex pleasure than thought, and it was to thought that we delivered ourselves over.

Como todo poseedor de una biblioteca, Aureliano se sabía culpable de no conocerla hasta el fin

Esa trama de tiempos que se aproximan, se bifurcan, se cortan o que secularmente se ignoran, abarca todas la posibilidades. No existimos en la mayoría de esos tiempos; en algunos existe usted y no yo; en otros, yo, no usted; en otros, los dos. En éste, que un favorable azar me depara, usted ha llegado a mi casa; en otro, usted, al atravesar el jardín, me ha encontrado muerto; en otro, yo digo estas mismas palabras, pero soy un error, un fantasma.

There is no intellectual exercise that is not ultimately pointless. A philosophical doctrine is, at first, a plausible description of the universe; the years go by, and it is a mere chapter -- if not a paragraph or proper noun -- in the history of philosophy.

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.

La casa no es tan grande, pensó. La agrandan la penumbra, la simetría, los espejos, los muchos años, mi desconocimiento, la soledad.

In all fiction, when a man is faced with alternatives he chooses one at the expense of others.

If honor and wisdom and happiness are not for me, let them be for others. Let heaven exist, though my place be in hell.

Israelites, Christians and Muslims profess immortality, but the veneration they render this world proves they believe only in it, since they destine all other worlds, in infinite number, to be its reward or punishment.

Sometimes a few birds, a horse, have saved the ruins of an amphitheater.