Top 380 Jorge Luis Borges Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “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

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

— Jorge Luis Borges

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

— Jorge Luis Borges

104. “Since then my loneliness does not pain me, because I know my redeemer lives and he will finally rise above the dust.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

105. “The art of writing is mysterious, the opinions we hold are ephemeral...”

— Jorge Luis Borges

106. “The word must have been in the beginning a magic symbol, which the usury of time wore out. The mission of the poet should be to restore to the word, at least in a partial way, its primitive and now secret force. All verse should have two obligations: to communicate a precise instance and to touch us physically, as the presence of the sea does.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

107. “Todos los hechos pueden ocurrirle a un hombre, desde el instante de su nacimiento hasta el de su muerte, han sido prefijados por el. Asi, toda negligencia es deliberada, todo casual encuentro una cita, toda humillacion una penitencia, todo fracaso una misteriosa victoria, toda muerte un suicidio. No hay consuelo mas habil que el pensamiento de que hemos elegido nuestras desdichas.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

108. “Happy is he who forgives others and who forgives himself.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

109. “Gradual blindness is not a tragedy. It’s like a slow summer dusk.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

110. “What a writer wants to do is not what he does.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

111. “Reality is not always probable, or likely. But if you’re writing a story, you have to make it as plausible as you can, because if not, the reader’s imagination will reject it.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

112. “Once I am dead, there will be no lack of pious hands to throw me over the railing; my grave will be the fathomless air; my body will sink endlessly and decay and dissolve in the wind generated by the fall, which is infinite.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

113. “Reality is partial to symmetry and slight anachronisms.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

114. “Felices los amados y los amantes y los que pueden prescindir del amor. Felices los felices.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

115. “That imminence of a revelation that is not yet produced, is perhaps the aesthetic reality.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

116. “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.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

117. “Besides, rereading, not reading, is what counts.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

118. “Personally, I am a hedonistic reader; I have never read a book merely because it was ancient. I read books for the aesthetic emotions they offer me, and I ignore the commentaries and criticism.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

119. “Por el amor, que nos deja ver a los otros como los ve la divinidad.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

120. “The mightiest love was granted him Love that does not expect to be loved.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

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

— Jorge Luis Borges

122. “Heaven and hell seem out of proportion to me: the actions of men do not deserve so much.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

123. “I don’t speak of vengeance, nor of forgiving; forgetting is the only revenge and the only forgiveness.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

124. “I suppose identity depends on memory. And if my memory is blotted out, then I wonder if I exist – I mean, if I am the same person. Of course, I don’t have to solve that problem. It’s up to God, if any.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

125. “The taste of the apple... lies in the contact of the fruit with the palate, not in the fruit itself; in a similar way... poetry lies in the meeting of poem and reader, not in the lines of symbols printed on the pages of a book. What is essential is the aesthetic act, the thrill, the almost physical emotion that comes with each reading.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

126. “We accept reality so readily – perhaps because we sense that nothing is real.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

127. “Leaving behind the babble of the plaza, I enter the Library. I feel, almost physically, the gravitation of the books, the enveloping serenity of order, time magically dessicated and preserved.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

128. “There is nothing in the world that is not mysterious, but the mystery is more evident in certain things than in others: in the sea, in the eyes of the elders, in the color yellow, and in music.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

129. “We have shared out, like thieves, the amazing treasures of days and nights.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

130. “The certainty that everything has already been written annuls us, or renders us phantasmal.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

131. “All literature, is, finally autobiographical.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

132. “Centuries of centuries and only in the present do things happen.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

133. “It also occurred to him that throughout history, humankind has told two stories: the story of a lost ship sailing the Mediterranean seas in quest of a beloved isle, and the story of a god who allows himself to be crucified on Golgotha.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

134. “For myth is at the beginning of literature, and also at its end.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

135. “I do not know whether music knows how to despair over music, or marble over marble, but literature is an art which knows how to prophesize the time in which it might have fallen silent, how to attack its own virtue, and how to fall in love with its own dissolution and court its own end.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

136. “It may be that universal history is the history of the different intonations given a handful of metaphors.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

137. “Like all the men of Babylon, I have been proconsul; like all, I have been a slave. I have known omnipotence, ignominy, imprisonment.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

138. “Death is just infinity closing in.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

139. “He thought that the rose was to be found in its own eternity and not in his words; and that we may mention or allude to a thing, but not express it.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

140. “If honor and wisdom and happiness are not for me, let them be for others. Let heaven exist, though my place be in hell. Let me be outraged and annihilated, but for one instant, in one being, let Your enormous Library be justified.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

141. “Chang Tzu tells us of a persevering man who after three laborious years mastered the art of dragon-slaying. For the rest of his days, he had not a single opportunity to test his skills.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

142. “I have been Homer; shortly, I shall be No One, like Ulysses; shortly, I shall be all men; I shall be dead.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

143. “Time, which despoils castles, enriches verses.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

144. “I think that the reader should enrich what he is reading. He should misunderstand the text; he should change it into something else.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

145. “Reality is not always probable, or likely.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

146. “To think is to ignore the differences, to generalize, to abstract.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

147. “I am almost sure to be blotted out by death, but sometimes I think it is not impossible that I may continue to live in some other manner after my physical death. Or, as Hamlet wonders, what dreams will come when we leave this body?”

— Jorge Luis Borges

148. “I do not know which of us has written this page.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

149. “When you reach my age, you realize you couldn’t have done things very much better or much worse than you did them in the first place.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

150. “I cannot lament the loss of a love or a friendship without meditating that one loses only what one really never had.”

— Jorge Luis Borges