Top 380 Jorge Luis Borges Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “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

202. “Another school declares that all time has already transpired and that our life is only the crepuscular and no doubt falsified and mutilated memory or reflection of an irrecoverable process.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

203. “There is no point in being overwhelmed by the appalling total of human sufferring; such a total does not exist. Neither poverty nor pain is accumulable.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

204. “A writer – and, I believe, generally all persons – must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

205. “The things that are said in literature are always the same. What is important is the way they are said.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

206. “That one individual should awaken in another memories that belong to still a third is an obvious paradox.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

207. “The steps a man takes from the day of his birth until that of his death trace in time an inconcievable figure. The Divine Mind intuitively grasps that form immediately, as men do a triangle.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

208. “Like all those possessing a library, Aurelian was aware that he was guilty of not knowing his in its entirety.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

209. “The task of art is to transform what is continuously happening to us, to transform all of these things into symbols, into music, into something which can last in man’s memory. That is our duty. If we don’t fulfill it, we feel unhappy.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

210. “A book is a physical object in a world of physical objects. It is a set of dead symbols. And then the right reader comes along, and the words – or rather the poetry behind the words, for the words themselves are mere symbols – spring to life, and we have a resurrection of the word.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

211. “Canada is so far away it hardly exists.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

212. “The universe is composed of an indefinite and perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

213. “I have sometimes suspected that the only thing that holds no mystery is happiness, because it is its own justification.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

214. “The flattery of posterity is not worth much more than contemporary flattery, which is worth nothing.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

215. “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.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

216. “In general, every country has the language it deserves.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

217. “What will die with me when I die, what pathetic or fragile form will the world lose?”

— Jorge Luis Borges

218. “I kept asking myself how a book could be infinite. I could not imagine any other than a cyclic volume, circular. A volume whose last page would be the same as the first and so have the possibility of continuing indefinitely.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

219. “There is an hour of the afternoon when the plain is on the verge of saying something. It never says, or perhaps it says it infinitely, or perhaps we do not understand it, or we understand it and it is untranslatable as music.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

220. “The truth is that we live out our lives putting off all that can be put off; perhaps we all know deep down that we are immortal and that sooner or later all men will do and know all things.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

221. “I wonder if I have woven through dreams the sexual strife. I don’t think so. But after all, my business is to weave dreams. I suppose I may be allowed to choose the material.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

222. “As a boy, I used to marvel that the letters in a closed book did not get scrambled and lost overnight.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

223. “To bless thine enemy is a good way to satisfy thy vanity.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

224. “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

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

— Jorge Luis Borges

226. “The exchange of thoughts is a condition necessary for all love, all friendship and all real dialogue. Two men who can speak together can enrich and broaden themselves indefinitely.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

227. “Loneliness does not worry me; life is difficult enough, putting up with yourself and with your own habits.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

228. “As the end approaches, there are no longer any images from memory – there are only words.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

229. “Poets, like the blind, can see in the dark.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

230. “How can we manage to illuminate the pathos of our lives?”

— Jorge Luis Borges

231. “Life and death have been lacking in my life.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

232. “In adultery, there is usually tenderness and self-sacrifice; in murder, courage; in profanation and blasphemy, a certain satanic splendour. Judas elected those offences unvisited by any virtues: abuse of confidence and informing.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

233. “There are countless men in the air, on land and at sea, and all that really happens happens to me.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

234. “He was very religious; he believed that he had a secret pact with God which exempted him from doing good in exchange for prayers and piety.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

235. “I’m alone and nobody is in the mirror.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

236. “Many people have thought of me as a thinker, as a philosopher, or even as a mystic. Well the truth is that though I have found reality perplexing enough – in fact, I find it gets more perplexing all the time – I never think of myself as a thinker.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

237. “Music, states of happiness, mythology, faces belaboured by time, certain twilights and certain places try to tell us something, or have said something we should have missed, or are about to say something; this imminence of a revelation which does not occur is, perhaps, the aesthetic phenomenon.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

238. “All theories are legitimate, no matter. What matters is what you do with them.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

239. “I have known uncertainty: a state unknown to the Greeks.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

240. “A circle drawn on a blackboard, a right triangle, a rhombus – all these are forms we can fully intuit; Ireneo could do the same with the stormy mane of a young colt, a small herd of cattle on a mountainside, a flickering fire and its uncountable ashes, and the many faces of a dead man at a wake. I have no idea how many stars he saw in the sky.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

241. “One literature differs from another, either before or after it, not so much because of the text as for the manner in which it is read.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

242. “In all fiction, when a man is faced with alternatives he chooses one at the expense of the others. In the almost unfathomable Ts’ui Pen, he chooses – simultaneously – all of them. He thus creates various futures, various times which start others that will in their turn branch out and bifurcate in other times. That is the cause of the contradictions in the novel.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

243. “Whoever would undertake some atrocious enterprise should act as if it were already accomplished should impose upon himself a future as irrevocable as the past.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

244. “Films are even stranger, for what we are seeing are not disguised people but photographs of disguised people, and yet we believe them while the film is being shown.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

245. “Lost in these imaginary illusions I forgot my destiny – that of the hunted.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

246. “Poetry remembers that it was an oral art before it was a written art.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

247. “The time for your labor has been granted.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

248. “Your unforgivable sins do not allow you to see my splendor.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

249. “Lully’s machine, Mill’s fear and Lasswitz’s chaotic library can be the subject of jokes, but they exaggerate a propensity which is common: making metaphysics and the arts into a kind of play with combinations.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

250. “I foresee that man will resign himself each day to new abominations, and soon that only bandits and soldiers will be left.”

— Jorge Luis Borges