Top 380 Jorge Luis Borges Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “I think most people are more important than their opinions.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

302. “Day and night, their frail and crippled ships defy the tempest.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

303. “The poverty of yesterday was less squalid than the poverty we purchase with our industry today. Fortunes were smaller then as well.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

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

— Jorge Luis Borges

305. “On February 14, I received a telegram from Buenos Aires urging me to return home immediately; my father was “not at all well.” God forgive me, but the prestige of being the recipient of an urgent telegram, the desire to communicate to all of Fray Bentos the contradiction between the negative form of the news and the absoluteness of the adverbial phrase, the temptation to dramatize my grief by feigning a virile stoicism-all this perhaps distracted me from any possibility of real pain.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

306. “A classic book is a book which generations of men, driven by various reasons, read with that same initial fervor and that same mysterious loyalty.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

307. “I owe the discovery of Uqbar to the conjunction of a mirror and an encyclopedia.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

308. “Words, words, words taken out of place and mutilated, words from other men – those were the alms left him by the hours and the centuries.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

309. “Centuries and centuries of idealism have not failed to influence reality.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

310. “Like Whitman, Chesterton thought that the mere fact of existing is so prodigious that no misfortune should exempt us from a kind of cosmic gratitude.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

311. “The web of time – the strands of which approach one another, bifurcate, intersect, or ignore each other through the centuries – embraces “every” possibility. We do not exist in most of them. In some you exist and not I, while in others I do, and you do not, and in yet others both of us exist.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

312. “When people write in favor or against anybody, that hardly helps or hurts them... man can be done or undone by his own writing, not by what other people say of him.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

313. “The indecipherable dust, once Shakespeare.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

314. “There is no greater comfort than the idea that we have chosen our own misfortunes.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

315. “I never reread what I’ve written. I’m far too afraid to feel ashamed of what I’ve done.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

316. “Perhaps a feature of the crucified face lurks in every mirror; perhaps the face died, was erased, so that God may be all of us. Who knows but that tonight we may see it in the labyrinth of dreams, and tomorrow not know we saw it.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

317. “Literature is not exhaustible, for the sufficient and simple reason that a single book is not.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

318. “Reality may be too complex for oral transmission; legend recreates it in a manner which is only accidentally false and which allows it to go about the world, from mouth to mouth.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

319. “My undertaking is not difficult, essentially. I should only have to be immortal to carry it out.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

320. “Imprecision is tolerable and verisimilar in literature, because we always tend towards it in life.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

321. “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

322. “It seemed incredible to me that day without premonitions or symbols should be the one of my inexorable death .”

— Jorge Luis Borges

323. “When I write, I do it urged by an intimate necessity. I don’t have in mind an exclusive public, or a public of multitudes, I don’t think in either thing. I think about expressing what I want to say. I try to do it in the simplest way possible.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

324. “When you come right down to it, opinions are the most superficial things about anyone.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

325. “He constructed a vast labyrinthine of periods, made impassable by the piling-up of clauses upon clauses-clauses in which oversight and bad grammar seemed manifestations of disdain.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

326. “In the order of literature, as in others, there is no act that is not the coronation of an infinite series of causes and the source of an infinite series of effects.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

327. “And I believe there was a rabbi who wrote that the Holy Scriptures were specifically destined, predestined, for each of its readers. That is, it has a different meaning if any of you read it or if I read it, or if it is read by men in the future or in the past.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

328. “Art always opts for the individual, the concrete; art is not Platonic.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

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

— Jorge Luis Borges

330. “So my life is a point-counterpoint, a kind of fugue, and a falling away–and everything winds up being lost to me, and everything falls into oblivion, or into the hands of the other man.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

331. “Little has happened to me in my lifetime, but I have read much.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

332. “Then he reflected that reality does not usually coincide with our anticipation of it; with a logic of his own he inferred that to forsee a circumstantial detail is to prevent its happening. Trusting in this weak magic, he invented, so that they would not happen, the most gruesome details.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

333. “I suspected once that any human life, however intricate and full it might be, consisted in reality of one moment: the moment when a man knows for all time who he is.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

334. “I know very little of my own work by heart, because I don’t like what I write. In fact, I find myself personally expressed far better in the writings of other poets than in my own, because I know all my mistakes – I know all the chinks and all the padding, I know that a particular line is weak, and so on. I read other poets in a different way; I don’t look too closely at them.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

335. “Poetry is given to the poet. I don’t think a poet can sit down at will and write. If he does, nothing worthwhile can come of it.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

336. “The execution was set for the 29th of March, at nine in the morning. This delay was due to a desire on the part of the authorities to act slowly and impersonally, in the manner of planets or vegetables.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

337. “Today is tomorrow and yesterday.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

338. “But I will relate what happened with absolute honesty; that, perhaps, will help me understand it. After all, 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

339. “I think it’s all to the good that a writer shouldn’t be too famous. Because, in a country where a writer may be famous, he may be pandering to the mob, celebrity and so on.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

340. “Emma dropped the paper. Her first impression was of a weak feeling in her stomach and in her knees; then of blind guilt, of unreality, of coldness, of fear; then she wished that it were already the next day. Immediately afterwards she realized that that wish was futile because the death of her father was the only thing that had happened in the world, and it would go on happening endlessly.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

341. “Cervantes’ text and Menard’s are verbally identical; but the second is almost infinitely richer.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

342. “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

343. “I have no personal system of philosophy. I never attempt to do that. I am merely a man of letters.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

344. “Years of solitude had taught him that, in one’s memory, all days tend to be the same, but that there is not a day, not even in jail or in the hospital, which does not bring surprises, which is not a translucent network of minimal surprises.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

345. “In fact I’m in too much of a mental muddle to know where I am – an idealist or not. I’m a mere man of letters, and I do what I can with those subjects.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

346. “Many of the characters are fools and they’re always playing tricks on me and treating me badly.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

347. “I... confirm the fact – with a certain bittersweet melancholy – that everything in the world brings me back to a quotation or a book.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

348. “Perhaps the apparent favor of the universe is no more than the crocodile grin of a Doberman breathing hard and about to be hungry?”

— Jorge Luis Borges

349. “The curious thing about The Ring and the Book, to which I will now return, is that although each character recounts the same events, and although there is no difference in what they tell, there is a fundamental difference, which belongs to the realm of human psychology, the fact that each of us believes we are justified. For example, the count admits he is a murderer, but the word “murderer” is too general. We know this from reading other books.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

350. “My story will be true to reality or, in any case, to my personal memory of reality, which amounts to the same thing.”

— Jorge Luis Borges