Top 380 Jorge Luis Borges Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “Time broadens the scope of verses and I know of some which, like music, are everything for all men.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

352. “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

353. “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

354. “I am attracted to fantastic writing, and fantastic reading, of course. But I think things that we call fantastic may be real, in the sense of being real symbols.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

355. “If a writer disbelieves what he is writing, then he can hardly expect his reader to believe it.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

356. “It’s a shame that we have to choose between two such second-rate countries as the USSR and the USA.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

357. “We spend our lives waiting for our book and it never comes.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

358. “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

359. “I would say, however, that romantic sentiment is a keen and pathetic sense of time, a few hours of amorous delight, the idea that everything passes away; a deeper sentiment for autumn, for twilight, for the passing nature of our own lives.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

360. “We have a very precise image – an image at times shameless – of what we have lost, but we are ignorant of what may follow or replace it.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

361. “If you sell, say, two thousand copies, it is the same thing as if you had sold nothing at all because two thousand is too vast – I mean, for the imagination to grasp. While thirty-seven people – perhaps thirty-seven are too many, perhaps seventeen would have been better or even seven – but still thirty-seven are still within the scope of one’s imagination.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

362. “I don’t think esthetic schools are important. What is important is the use that is made of them, or whatever the individual writer does.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

363. “Nationalism only allows for affirmations, and every doctrine that discards doubt, negation, is a form of fanaticism and stupidity.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

364. “Instinctively he had already become proficient in the habit of simulating that he was someone, so that others would not discover his condition as no one; in London he found the profession to which he was predestined, that of the actor, who on a stage plays at being another before a gathering of people who play at taking him for that other person.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

365. “I know what the Greeks do not know, incertitude.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

366. “I have always come to life after coming to books.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

367. “I’m not interested in the fact that a writer may label himself as being intellectual or anti-intellectual. l’m really interested in the stuff he’s turning out.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

368. “All men, in the vertiginous moment of coitus, are the same man. All men who repeat a line from Shakespeare are William Shakespeare.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

369. “I had no wish to take any determined route on that stroll; I attempted, rather, a maximum latitude of probabilities in order not to wear out expectation with an obligatory anticipation of a single one of them. I was able, within the imperfect limits of possibility, to walk, as they say, at random. I accepted, without any conscious prejudice but that of avoiding the wider avenues and streets, the most obscure invitations of chance.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

370. “I reverently fondled the silky volumes of a certain Chinese encyclopaedia whose finely brushed characters seemed to me more mysterious than the spots on a leopard’s skin.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

371. “Work that endures is always capable of an infinite and plastic ambiguity; it is all things for all men, like the Apostle; it is a mirror that reflects the reader’s own features and it is also a map of the world. Moreover, all this must come about in an evanescent and modest way, almost in spite of the author, who must appear to be ignorant of any and all symbolism.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

372. “In my own case, the process is more or less unvarying. I begin with the glimpse of a form, a kind of remote island, which will eventually be a story or a poem. I see the end and I see the beginning, but not what is in between. That is gradually revealed to me, when the stars or chance are propitious. More than once, I have had to retrace my steps by way of the shadows.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

373. “I reread these negative remarks and realize that I do not know whether music can despair of music or marble of marble. I do know that literature is an art that can foresee the time when it will be silenced, an art that can become inflamed with its own virtue, fall in love with its own decline, and court its own demise.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

374. “The magnetized mountain and the genie who swore to kill his benefactor are – who would deny it? – marvelous, but not so much more than the morning itself and the mere fact of being.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

375. “What will die with me the day I die? What pathetic or frail image will be lost to the world?”

— Jorge Luis Borges

376. “The notion of art as a compromise is a simplification, for no one knows entirely what he is doing. A writer can conceive a fable, Kipling acknowledged, without grasping its moral. He must be true to his imagination, and not to the mere ephemeral circumstances of a supposed ‘reality’.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

377. “I offer her that kernel of myself that I have saved, somehow – the central heart that deals not in words, traffics not with dreams and is untouched by time, by joy, by adversities.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

378. “Now that I possess the secret, I could tell it in a hundred different and even contradictory ways. I don’t know how to tell you this, but the secret is beautiful, and science, our science, seems mere frivolity to me now... And anyway, the secret is not as important as the paths that led me to it. Each person has to walk those paths himself.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

379. “I’m sorry to say that people have written fifty or sixty books about me. I haven’t read a single one of them, since I know too much of the subject, and I’m sick and tired of it.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

380. “He was the solitary lucid spectator of a multiform, momentaneous, and almost unbearably precise world.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

381. “I still hold two images of the ranch – the one I brought with me and the one my eyes finally saw.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

382. “In the depths of the siesta amorous doves called huskily;.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

383. “Borelius inquires mockingly: “Why didn’t he renounce his renunciation? Or renounce the idea of renouncing his renunciation?”

— Jorge Luis Borges

384. “To be not a man, but the projection of another man’s dream- what incomparable humiliation, what vertigo!”

— Jorge Luis Borges

385. “It will be said that the conclusion no doubt preceded its “proofs.” But what man can content himself with seeking out proofs for a thing that not even he himself believes in, or whose teaching he cares naught for?”

— Jorge Luis Borges

386. “The acts of madmen exceed the previsions of the sane.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

387. “Any life, no matter how long or complex it may be, is made up essentially of a single moment – the moment in which a man finds out, once and for all, who he is.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

388. “Time is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire.”

— Jorge Luis Borges