Top 380 Jorge Luis Borges Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— Jorge Luis Borges

Featured in: Quotes About Books And Reading, Reflection Quotes, Knowledge Quotes, Culture Quotes, Library Quotes

2. “Don’t talk unless you can improve the silence.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

Featured in: Communication Quotes

3. “Time can’t be measured in days the way money is measured in pesos and centavos, because all pesos are equal, while every day, perhaps every hour, is different.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

Featured in: Time Quotes, Different Quotes

4. “So plant your own gardens and decorate your own soul, instead of waiting for someone to bring you flowers.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

5. “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.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

Featured in: Quotes About Fire

6. “Life itself is a quotation.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

7. “The future is inevitable and precise, but it may not occur. God lurks in the gaps.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

8. “La duda es uno de los nombres de la inteligencia.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

9. “Writing is nothing more than a guided dream.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

10. “When writers die they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarnation.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

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

— Jorge Luis Borges

12. “Doubt is one of the names of intelligence.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

Featured in: Doubt Quotes

13. “I think of reading a book as no less an experience than travelling or falling in love.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

Featured in: Reading Quotes

14. “The original is unfaithful to the translation.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

15. “The mind was dreaming. The world was its dream.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

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

— Jorge Luis Borges

17. “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.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

18. “What you really value is what you miss, not what you have.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

19. “Truth never penetrates an unwilling mind.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

20. “All writing is dreaming.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

21. “Estoy solo y no hay nadie en el espejo.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

22. “It only takes two facing mirrors to build a labyrinth.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

23. “A book is not an isolated being: it is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

24. “I cannot sleep unless I am surrounded by books.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

Featured in: Reading Quotes

25. “I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities I have visited.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

26. “I saw all the mirrors on earth and none of them reflected me.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

27. “While we are asleep in this world, we are awake in another one.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

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

— Jorge Luis Borges

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

— Jorge Luis Borges

30. “No one is anyone, one single immortal man is all men. Like Cornelius Agrippa, 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.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

31. “Time forks perpetually toward innumerable futures.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

32. “For me, beauty is a physical sensation, something we feel with our whole body. It is not the result of judgement. We do not arrive at it by way of rules. We either feel beauty or we don’t.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

33. “The tango is a direct expression of something that poets have often tried to state in words: the belief that a fight may be a celebration.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

34. “We forget that we are all dead men conversing with dead men.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

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

— Jorge Luis Borges

36. “There are those who seek the love of a woman to forget her, to not think about her.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

37. “You who read me, are You sure of understanding my language?”

— Jorge Luis Borges

38. “Democracy is an abuse of statistics.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

39. “Being an agnostic means all things are possible, even God, even the Holy Trinity. This world is so strange that anything may happen, or may not happen. Being an agnostic makes me live in a larger, a more fantastic kind of world, almost uncanny. It makes me more tolerant.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

40. “Reading is an activity subsequent to writing: more resigned, more civil, more intellectual.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

Featured in: Reading Quotes

41. “Everything touches everything.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

42. “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.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

43. “Unlike the novel, a short story may be, for all purposes, essential.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

44. “To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

45. “Any life is made up of a single moment, the moment in which a man finds out, once and for all, who he is.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

46. “In vain have oceans been squandered on you, in vain the sun, wonderfully seen through Whitman’s eyes. You have used up the years and they have used up you, and still, and still, you have not written the poem.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

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

— Jorge Luis Borges

48. “The sea is an idiom I cannot decipher.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

49. “What eternity is to time, the Aleph is to space.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

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

— Jorge Luis Borges

Featured in: Reading Quotes