Jorge Luis Borges
To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god.Collection: Religion
I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.Collection: Imagination
To be immortal is commonplace; except for man, all creatures are immortal, for they are ignorant of death; what is divine, terrible, incomprehensible, is to know that one is immortal.Collection: Death
To die for a religion is easier than to live it absolutely.Collection: Religion
Time is the substance from which I am made. Time is a river which carries me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger that devours me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire.Collection: Time
Democracy is an abuse of statistics.Collection: Government
Poetry remembers that it was an oral art before it was a written art.Collection: Poetry
Any life is made up of a single moment, the moment in which a man finds out, once and for all, who he is.Collection: Life
Nothing is built on stone; all is built on sand, but we must build as if the sand were stone.
The original is unfaithful to the translation.
Life itself is a quotation.
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.
My undertaking is not difficult, essentially. I should only have to be immortal to carry it out.
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.
Like all writers, he measured the achievements of others by what they had accomplished, asking of them that they measure him by what he envisaged or planned.
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.
I foresee that man will resign himself each day to new abominations, and soon that only bandits and soldiers will be left.
Reading is an activity subsequent to writing: more resigned, more civil, more intellectual.
Reality is not always probable, or likely.
There is a concept that is the corrupter and destroyer of all others. I speak not of Evil, whose limited empire is that of ethics; I speak of the infinite.
Art always opts for the individual, the concrete; art is not Platonic.
I have known uncertainty: a state unknown to the Greeks.
The fact is that all writers create their precursors. Their work modifies our conception of the past, just as it is bound to modify the future.
The central problem of novel-writing is causality.
Life and death have been lacking in my life.
The flattery of posterity is not worth much more than contemporary flattery, which is worth nothing.
The Falklands thing was a fight between two bald men over a comb.
Writing is nothing more than a guided dream.
One concept corrupts and confuses the others. I am not speaking of the Evil whose limited sphere is ethics; I am speaking of the infinite.
In general, every country has the language it deserves.
Like all those possessing a library, Aurelian was aware that he was guilty of not knowing his in its entirety.
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.Collection: Art
Don't talk unless you can improve the silence.Collection: Inspirational
Being with you and not being with you is the only way I have to measure time.Collection: Love
So plant your own gardens and decorate your own soul, instead of waiting for someone to bring you flowers.Collection: Inspirational
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.Collection: Life
Truth never penetrates an unwilling mind.Collection: Truth
While we are asleep in this world, we are awake in another oneCollection: Inspirational
Doubt is one of the names of intelligence.Collection: Names
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.Collection: Inspirational
What you really value is what you miss, not what you have.Collection: Missing
The worst labyrinth is not that intricate form that can entrap us forever, but a single and precise straight lineCollection: Inspirational
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.Collection: Memories
In my next life I will try to commit more errors.Collection: Errors
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.Collection: Religious
Creativity is suspended between memory and forgetting.Collection: Memories
Only in the present do things happen.Collection: Mental Health
Dictatorships foster oppression, dictatorships foster servitude, dictatorships foster cruelty; more abominable is the fact that they foster idiocy.Collection: Inspirational
The future has no other reality than as present hope, and the past is no more than present memory.Collection: Memories
The mind was dreaming. The world was its dream.Collection: Dream