Borges Quotes

I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.
― Jorge Luis Borges

I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities I have visited.
― Jorge Luis Borges

Let others pride themselves about how many pages they have written; I'd rather boast about the ones I've read.
― Jorge Luis Borges

Being with you and not being with you is the only way I have to measure time.
― Jorge Luis Borges

I cannot sleep unless I am surrounded by books.
― Jorge Luis Borges

You have wakened not out of sleep, but into a prior dream, and that dream lies within another, and so on, to infinity, which is the number of grains of sand. The path that you are to take is endless, and you will die before you have truly awakened.
― Jorge Luis Borges

To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god.
― Jorge Luis Borges

I can give you my loneliness, my darkness, the hunger of my heart, I am trying to bribe you with uncertainty, with danger, with defeat.
― Jorge Luis Borges

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, Twenty-Four Conversations with Borges: Interviews by Roberto Alifano 1981-1983

The mind was dreaming. The world was its dream.
― Jorge Luis Borges

A book is more than a verbal structure or series of verbal structures; it is the dialogue it establishes with its reader and the intonation it imposes upon his voice and the changing and durable images it leaves in his memory. A book is not an isolated being: it is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships.
― Jorge Luis Borges

Reality is not always probable, or likely.
― Jorge Luis Borges

Personally, I am a hedonistic reader; I have never read a book merely because it was ancient. I read books for the aesthetic emotions they offer me, and I ignore the commentaries and criticism.
― Jorge Luis Borges, Seven Nights

Heaven and hell seem out of proportion to me: the actions of men do not deserve so much.
― Jorge Luis Borges

When writers die they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarnation.

[As attributed by Alastair Reid in Neruda and Borges, The New Yorker, June 24, 1996; as well as in The Talk of the Town, The New Yorker, July 7, 1986]”
― Jorge Luis Borges

Life itself is a quotation.
― Jorge Luis Borges

Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire.
― Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings

“Writing is nothing more than a guided dream.
― Jorge Luis Borges

The original is unfaithful to the translation.
― Jorge Luis Borges

A man sets out to draw the world. As the years go by, he peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, instruments, stars, horses, and individuals. A short time before he dies, he discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines traces the lineaments of his own face.
― Jorge Luis Borges, The Aleph and Other Stories

Truly fine poetry must be read aloud. A good poem does not allow itself to be read in a low voice or silently. If we can read it silently, it is not a valid poem: a poem demands pronunciation. Poetry always remembers that it was an oral art before it was a written art. It remembers that it was first song.
― Jorge Luis Borges

No one is anyone, one single immortal man is all men. Like Cornelius Agrippa, 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

Nothing is built on stone; All is built on sand, but we must build as if the sand were stone.
― Jorge Luis Borges

Music, feelings of happiness, mythology, faces worn by time, certain twilights and certain places, want to tell us something, or they told us something that we should not have missed, or they are about to tell us something; this imminence of a revelation that is not produced is, perhaps, 'the aesthetic event'.
― Jorge Luis Borges

To die for a religion is easier than to live it absolutely.
― Jorge Luis Borges

Besides, rereading, not reading, is what counts.
― Jorge Luis Borges

Writing long books is a laborious and impoverishing act of foolishness: expanding in five hundred pages an idea that could be perfectly explained in a few minutes. A better procedure is to pretend that those books already exist and to offer a summary, a commentary.
― Jorge Luis Borges

You can't measure time by days, the way you measure money by dollars and cents, because dollars are all the same while every day is different and maybe every hour as well.
― Jorge Luis Borges