Jorge Luis Borges Quotes

"It is a laborious madness and an impoverishing one, the madness of composing vast books - setting out in five hundred pages an idea that can be perfectly related orally in five minutes. The better way to go about it is to pretend that those books already exist, and offer a summary, a commentary on them." (From the Introduction of 1941's The Garden of Forking Paths)

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.

It may be that universal history is the history of the different intonations given a handful of metaphors.

Your unforgivable sins do not allow you to see my splendor.

There is nothing very remarkable about being immortal; with the exception of mankind, all creatures are immortal, for they know nothing of death. What is divine, terrible, and incomprehensible is to know oneself immortal.

The exercise of letters is sometimes linked to the ambition to construct an absolute book, a book of books that includes the others like a Platonic archetype, an object whose virtues are not diminished by the passage of time.

With relief, with humiliation, with terror, he understood that he too was a mere appearance, dreamt by another.

For one of those gnostics, the visible universe was an illusion or, more precisely, a sophism. Mirrors and fatherhood are abominable because they multiply it and extend it.

The fact is that poetry is not the books in the library . . . Poetry is the encounter of the reader with the book, the discovery of the book.

I think that the reader should enrich what he is reading. He should misunderstand the text; he should change it into something else.

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 that I have visited, all my ancestors.

بعد فترة تتعلم الفرق الواهي
بين الإمساك بيد وبين تكبيل روح،
وتتعلم أن الحب لا يعني الاتكاء
وأن الصحبة لا تعني الأمان.
وتبدأ بالتعلم أن القبل لا تعني اتفاقات مبرمة
وأن الهدايا ليست وعوداً
وتبدأ بتقبل هزائمك
مع رأسك مرفوع وعينيك مفتوحتين
بسمو إمرأة، وليس بحزن طفل،
وتتعلم بناء كل دروبك على يومك الحاضر
لأن أرض الغد غير جديرة بالثقة بالنسبة الى الخطط
بعد فترة تتعلم...
إنه حتى أشعة الشمس تحرق إذا بالغت في الاقتراب.
لذا تقوم بزرع حديقتك وتزيّن روحك
بدلاً من انتظار شخص ما ليحضر لك الزهور.
وتتعلم أنه بمقدورك حقاً الاحتمال...
انك حقاً قوي
وأنك تطوي قيمتك بداخلك...
وتتعلم وتتعلم...
مع كل وداع تتعلم.

أن تحملق فى النهر الذى يصنعه الزمن والماء
وأن تتذكر أن الزمن ذاته نهر آخر
أن تعرف أننا نكف عن الوجود، تماما مثل النهر
وأن وجوهنا تموت وترحل، تماما مثل الماء
أن تُحسّ بأن الاستيقاظ نوم آخر
يحلم بأنه لا ينام وبأن الموت
الذى يرتعد منه لحمنا، هو نفسه ذلك الموت
الذى يحدث كل ليلة، والذى نسميه النوم
أن ترى فى اليوم أو فى السنة رمزا
لأيام البشرية وسنينها
أن تُحوّل إهانة السنين
إلى موسيقى، وحفيف، ورمز

"Wakefield" prefigures Franz Kafka, but the latter modifies, and sharpens, the reading of "Wakefield." The debt is mutual; a great writer creates his or her precursors. He or she creates them and in some fashion justifies them.

It is universally held that the unicorn is a supernatural being and of auspicious omen; so say the odes, the annals, the biographies of worthies, and other texts whose authority is unimpeachable. Even village women and children know that the unicorn is a lucky sign. But this animal does not figure among the barnyard animals, it is not always easy to come across, it does not lend itself to zoological classification. Nor is it like the horse or bull, the wolf or deer. In such circumstances we may be face to face with a unicorn and not know for sure that we are. We know that a certain animal with a mane is a horse and that a certain animal with horns is a bull. We do not know what the unicorn looks like.