Top 380 Jorge Luis Borges Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “The exercise of letters is sometimes linked to the ambition to contruct an absolute book, a book of books that includes the otherslike a Platonic archetype, an object whose virtues are not diminished by the passage of time.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

252. “Mir Bahadur Ali is, as we have seen, incapable of evading the most vulgar of art’s temptations: that of being a genius.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

253. “In the dreaming man’s dream, the dreamed man awoke.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

254. “The future is as irrevocable as an inflexible yesterday.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

255. “The library will endure; it is the universe. As for us, everything has not been written; we are not turning into phantoms. We walk the corridors, searching the shelves and rearranging them, looking for lines of meaning amid leagues of cacophony and incoherence, reading the history of the past and our future, collecting our thoughts and collecting the thoughts of others, and every so often glimpsing mirrors, in which we may recognize creatures of the information.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

256. “Being with you or without you is how I measure my time.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

257. “My advanced age has taught me the resignation of being Borges.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

258. “My father gave me free run of his library. When I think of my boyhood, I think in terms of the books I read.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

259. “The morning sun shone over the bronze blade. There were no more traces of blood left. “Would you believe it Ariadne?” said Theseus “The Minotaur almost didn’t defend itself.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

260. “Methodical writing distracts me from the present condition of men. But the certainty that everything has been already written nullifies or makes phantoms of us all.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

261. “Poetry springs from something deeper; it’s beyond intelligence.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

262. “I am this groping intensity that is a soul.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

263. “The image of the Lord has been replaced by a mirror.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

264. “A writer always begins by being too complicated – he’s playing at several games at once.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

265. “Differing from Newton and Schopenhauer, your ancestor did not think of time as absolute and uniform. He believed it an infinite series of times, in a dizzily growing, ever spreading network of diverging, converging and parallel times.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

266. “In the course of a life devoted less to living than to reading, I have verified many times that literary intentions and theories are nothing more than stimuli and that the final work usually ignores or even contradicts them.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

267. “Each thing implies the universe.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

268. “The heresies we should fear are those which can be confused with orthodoxy.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

269. “To be immortal is commonplace; except for man, all creatures are immortal, for they are ignorant of death.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

270. “The truth is that we all live by leaving behind; no doubt we all profoundly know that we are immortal and that sooner or later every man will do all things and know everything.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

271. “This felicitous supposition declared that there is only one Individual, and that this indivisible Individual is every one of the separate beings in the universe, and that these beings are the instruments and masks of divinity itself.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

272. “Time is the substance of which we are made.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

273. “Historical truth, for him, is not what has happened; it is what we judge to have happened.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

274. “The certitude that everything has been written negates us or turns us into phantoms.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

275. “There is a Talmudic legend about three men who go in search of God. One became insane, the other died, and the third met himself.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

276. “I ask of any God, of any gods, that if they give immortality, I hope to be granted oblivion also.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

277. “Art is very mysterious. I wonder if you can really do any damage to art. I think that when we’re writing, something comes through or should come through, in spite of our theories. So theories are not really important.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

278. “I have no way of knowing whether the events that I am about to narrate are effects or causes.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

279. “This web of time – the strands of which approach one another, bifurcate, intersect or ignore eachother through the centuries – embrace every posibility.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

280. “There is a saying that only the man who has already committed a crime and repented of it is incapable of that crime; to be free of an erroneous opinion, I myself might add, one must at some time have professed it.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

281. “I don’t think there’s any essential difference, at least for me, between writing poetry and writing prose.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

282. “The I feel a contentment in defeat, I reflected, simply because defeat has come, because it is infinitely connected to all the acts that are, that were, and that shall be, because to censure or deplore a single real act is to blaspheme against the universe.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

283. “When one confesses to an act, one ceases to be an actor in it and becomes its witness, becomes a man that observes and narrates it and no longer the man that performed it.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

284. “What will die with me the day I die? What pathetic or frail image will be lost to the world? The voice of Macedonio Fernandez, the image of a bay horse in a vacant lot on the corner of Sarrano and Charcas, a bar of sulfur in the drawer of a mahogany desk?”

— Jorge Luis Borges

285. “The central problem of novel-writing is causality.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

286. “I owe my first inkling of the problem of infinity to a large biscuit tin that was a source of vertiginous mystery during my childhood.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

287. “The mathematical sciences wield their particular language made of digits and signs, no less subtle than any other.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

288. “Tearing money is an impiety, like throwing away bread.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

289. “I carried out my plan because I felt The Chief had some fear of those of my race, of those uncountable forebears whose culmination lies in me. I wished to prove to him that a yellow man could save his armies.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

290. “The European and the North American consider that a book that has been awarded any kind of prize must be good; the Argentine allows for the possibility that the book might not be bad, despite the prize.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

291. “Then Bioy Casares recalled that one of the heresiarchs of Uqbar had stated that mirrors and copulation are abominable, since they both multiply the numbers of man.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

292. “Solitude weighs me down. Company does too.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

293. “No one is a poet from eight to twelve and from two to six. Whoever is a poet is one always, and continually assaulted by poetry.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

294. “I came to the idea of how fine it would be to think of an encyclopedia of an actual world, and then of an encyclopedia, a very rigorous one of course, of an imaginary world, where everything should be linked.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

295. “As to my writing short pieces, there are two reasons I can give you. The first is my invincible laziness. The second is that I’ve always been fond of short stories, and it always took me some trouble to get through a novel.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

296. “The man who acquires an encyclopedia does not thereby acquire every line, every paragraph, every page, and every illustration; he acquires the possibility of becoming familiar with one and another of those things.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

297. “The indecipherable dust, once Shakespeare.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

298. “Words are symbols that assume a shared memory. The memory I now want to set down is mine alone; all those who share it have died. The mystics invoke a rose, a kiss, a bird that is all birds, a sun that is all the stars and the sun, a jug of wine, a garden, or the sexual act. Of these metaphors, none will serve me for that long, joyous night, which left us, tired out and happy, at the borders of dawn.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

299. “Application, resignation, and chance had gone into the writing; I saw, however, that Daneri’s real work lay not in the poetry but in his invention of reasons why the poetry should be admired. Of course, this second phase of his effort modified the writing in his eyes, though not in the eyes of others.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

300. “I would rather like to think of God as being a kind of adventurer – even as Wells thought about him – or perhaps as something within us making for some unknown purpose.”

— Jorge Luis Borges