Top 380 Jorge Luis Borges Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “Happy are the beloved and the lovers and those who can live without love.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

52. “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

53. “There’s no need to build a labyrinth when the entire universe is one.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

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

— Jorge Luis Borges

55. “The dictionary is based on the hypothesis – obviously an unproven one – that languages are made up of equivalent synonyms.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

56. “Soccer is popular because stupidity is popular.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

57. “Beyond my anxiety, beyond this writing, the universe waits, inexhaustible, inviting.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

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

— Jorge Luis Borges

59. “From my weakness, I drew strength that never left me.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

60. “Every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

61. “Every man should be capable of all ideas.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

62. “Translations are a partial and precious documentation of the changes the text suffers.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

63. “You have wakened not out of sleep, but into a prior dream, and that dream lies within another, and so on, to infinity, which is the number of grains of sand. The path that you are to take is endless, and you will die before you have truly awakened.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

64. “It means much to have loved, to have been happy, to have laid my hand on the living Garden, even for a day.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

65. “Only in the present do things happen.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

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

— Jorge Luis Borges

67. “Art is fire plus algebra.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

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

— Jorge Luis Borges

69. “What man of us has never felt, walking through the twilight or writing down a date from his past, that he has lost something infinite?”

— Jorge Luis Borges

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

— Jorge Luis Borges

71. “Reality favors symmetry.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

72. “Censorship is the mother of metaphor.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

73. “A man sets himself the task of portraying the world. Shortly before he dies he discovers that this patient labyrinth of lines is a drawing of his own face.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

74. “Art is endless like a river flowing, passing, yet remaining...”

— Jorge Luis Borges

75. “The visible universe was an illusion or, more precisely, a sophism. Mirrors and fatherhood are abominable because they multiply it and extend it.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

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

— Jorge Luis Borges

77. “La derrota tiene una dignidad que la ruidosa victoria no merece.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

78. “I thought that a man can be an enemy of other men, of the moments of other men, but not of a country: not of fireflies, words, gardens, streams of water, sunsets.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

79. “I saw a sunset in Queretaro that seemed to reflect the colour of a rose in Bengal.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

80. “The machinery of the world is far too complex for the simplicity of men.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

81. “We have stopped believing in progress. What progress that is !”

— Jorge Luis Borges

82. “The present is the instant in which the future crumbles into the past.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

83. “What I’m really concerned about is reaching one person. And that person may be myself for all I know.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

84. “You may win your heart’s desire, but in the end you’re cheated of it by death.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

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

— Jorge Luis Borges

86. “On the floor, and hanging on to the bar, squatted an old man, immobile as an object. His years had reduced and polished him as water does a stone or the generations of men do a sentence.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

87. “I live in a grey world, rather like the silver screen world. But yellow stands out.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

88. “Lo que decimos pocas veces se parece a nosotros.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

89. “There is a labyrinth which is a straight line.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

90. “There is no intellectual exercise which is not ultimately useless.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

91. “All language is a set of symbols whose use among its speakers assumes a shared past. How, then, can I translate into words the limitless Aleph, which my floundering mind can scarcely encompass?”

— Jorge Luis Borges

92. “As we all know, there is a kind of lazy pleasure in useless and out-of-the-way erudition.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

93. “El problema no es que mientas. El problema es que te creo.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

94. “Writing long books is a laborious and impoverishing act of foolishness: expanding in five hundred pages an idea that could be perfectly explained in a few minutes. A better procedure is to pretend that those books already exist and to offer a summary, a commentary.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

95. “The central fact of my life has been the existence of words and the possibility of weaving those words into poetry.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

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

— Jorge Luis Borges

97. “No one can read two thousand books. In the four hundred years I have lived, I’ve not read more than half a dozen.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

98. “A writer’s work is the product of laziness.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

99. “There is nothing but quotations left for us. Our language is a system of quotations.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

100. “Que el cielo exista, aunque mi lugar sea el infierno.”

— Jorge Luis Borges