Top 380 Jorge Luis Borges Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “The possibilities of the art of combination are not infinite, but they tend to be frightful.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

152. “I always imagine them at nightfall, in the dusk of a slum or a vacant lot, in that long, quiet moment when things are gradually left alone, with their backs to the sunset, and when colors are like memories or premonitions of other colors. We must not be too prodigal with our angels; they are the last divinities we harbor, and they might fly away.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

153. “To say good-bye is to deny separation; it is to say Today we play at going our own ways, but we’ll see each other tomorrow. Men invented farewells because they somehow knew themselves to be immortal, even while seeing themselves as contingent and ephemeral.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

154. “When I wake up, I wake to something worse. It’s the astonishment of being myself.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

155. “A system is nothing more than the subordination of all aspects of the universe to any one of such aspects.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

156. “When I feel I’m going to write something, then I just am quiet and I try to listen. Then something comes through. And I do what I can in order not to tamper with it.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

157. “Sometimes I suspect that good readers are even blacker and rarer swans than good writers.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

158. “In truth, the Library includes all verbal structures, all variations permitted by the twenty-five orthographical symbols, but not a single example of absolute nonsense.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

159. “Ts’ui Pe must have said once: I am withdrawing to write a book. And another time: I am withdrawing to construct a labyrinth. Every one imagined two works; to no one did it occur that the book and the maze were one and the same thing.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

160. “Misery requires paradises lost.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

161. “Like all writers, he measured the achievements of others by what they had accomplished, asking of them that they measure him by what he envisaged or planned.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

162. “I kept getting close to happiness and have stood in the shadow of suffering.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

163. “A writer should have another lifetime to see if he’s appreciated.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

164. “Mirrors and copulation are abominable, since they both multiply the numbers of men...”

— Jorge Luis Borges

165. “I am not certain whether I ever believed in the City of the Immortals; I think the task of finding it was enough for me.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

166. “I believe that in time we will have reached the point where we will deserve to be free of government.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

167. “In my soul the afternoon grows wider and I reflect.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

168. “A writer – and, I believe, generally all persons – must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

169. “What is past is what is real.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

170. “My books standing there on the shelf do not know that I have written them.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

171. “That is what always happens: we never know whether we are victors or whether we are defeated.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

172. “And life is, I am sure, made of poetry. Poetry is not alien – poetry is, as we will see, lurking round the corner. It may spring on us at any moment.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

173. “Know this: in some way you’re already dead.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

174. “Every so many years, he went to England to visit – judging by the photographs he showed us – a sundial and some oak trees.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

175. “The years pass and I’ve told this story so many times I no longer know whether I remember it as it was or whether it’s only my words I’m remembering.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

176. “All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

177. “O Time thy pyramids.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

178. “The minotaur more than justifies the existence of the labyrinth .”

— Jorge Luis Borges

179. “Time is the thing I am made of. Time is a river that sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger that tears me apart, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire. The world, unfortunately, is real; I, unfortunately, am Borges.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

180. “Man’s memory shapes Its own Eden within.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

181. “El ejecutor de una empresa atroz debe imaginar que ya la ha cumplido, debe imponerse un porvenir que sea irrevocable como el pasado.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

182. “My father and he had one of those English friendships which begins by avoiding the intimacies and eventually eliminates speech altogether.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

183. “La lectura debe ser una de las formas de la felicidad y no se puede obligar a nadie a ser feliz.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

184. “I thought of a labyrinth of labyrinths, of one sinuous spreading labyrinth that would encompass the past and the future and in some way involve the stars.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

185. “Then I reflect that all things happen, happen to one, precisely now. Century follows century, and things happen only in the present. There are countless men in the air, on land and at sea, and all that really happens happens to me.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

186. “In death we shall rediscover all the instants of our life and we shall freely combine them as in dreams.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

187. “Fame is a form, perhaps the worst form, of incomprehension.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

188. “The story of two dreams is a coincidence, a line drawn by chance, like the shapes of lions or horses that are sometimes formed by clouds.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

189. “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.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

190. “I felt what we always feel when someone dies–the sad awareness, now futile, of how little it would have cost us to have been more loving. One forgets that one is a dead man conversing with dead men.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

191. “In the dream of the man that dreamed, the dreamed one awoke.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

192. “Scattered through the ordinary world, there are books and artifacts and perhaps people who are like doorways into impossible realms, of impossible and contradictory truth.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

193. “Let neither tear nor reproach besmirch this declaration of the mastery of God who, with magnificent irony, granted me both the gift of books and the night.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

194. “One concept corrupts and confuses the others. I am not speaking of the Evil whose limited sphere is ethics; I am speaking of the infinite.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

195. “Dictatorships foster oppression, dictatorships foster servitude, dictatorships foster cruelty; more abominable is the fact that they foster idiocy.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

196. “To arrange a library is to practice in a quiet and modest way the art of criticism.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

197. “There are no moral or intellectual merits. Homer composed the Odyssey; if we postulate an infinite period of time, with infinite circumstances and changes, the impossible thing is not to compose the Odyssey, at least once.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

198. “I secretly assumed, as poets do, The duty on me to define the moon.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

199. “Captivated by its discipline, humanity forgets and goes on forgetting that it is the discipline of chess players, not of angels.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

200. “Of all man’s instruments, the most wondrous, no doubt, is the book. The other instruments are extensions of his body. The microscope, the telescope, are extensions of his sight; the telephone is the extension of his voice; then we have the plow and the sword, extensions of the arm. But the book is something else altogether: the book is an extension of memory and imagination.”

— Jorge Luis Borges