Jorge Luis Borges Quotes

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

What one man does is something done, in some measure, by all men. For that reason a disobedience committed in a garden contaminates the human race; for that reason it is not unjust that the crucifixion of a single Jew suffices to save it.

There are people who barely feel poetry, and they are generally dedicated to teaching it.

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.

On September 20, 1792, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (who had accompanied the Duke of Weimar on a military expedition to Paris) saw the finest army of Europe inexplicably repulsed at Valmy by some French militiamen, and said to his disconcerted friends: "In this place and on this day, a new epoch in the history of the world is beginning, and we shall be able to say that we have been present at its origin." Since that time historic days have been numerous, and one of the tasks of governments (especially in Italy, Germany, and Russia) has been to fabricate them or to simulate them with an abundance of preconditioning propaganda followed by relentless publicity.

The vast ineptitude of his pretense would be a convincing proof that this was no fraud.

Life and death have been lacking in my life.

أنا الذي كنت عدة أشخاص بلا طائل، أريد أن أكون شخصاً واحداً، أنا نفسي

Man's memory shapes
Its own Eden within

The central problem of novel-writing is causality.

On the floor, and hanging on to the bar, squatted an old man, immobile as an object. His years had reduced and polished him as water does a stone or the generations of men do a sentence. He was dark, dried up, diminutive, and seemed outside time, situated in eternity.

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.

إننا بحاجة إلى الخيال كي نواجه تلك الفظاعات التي تفرضها علينا الأشياء.

The man who acquires an encyclopedia does not thereby acquire every line, every paragraph, every page, and every illustration; he acquires the possibility of becoming familiar with one and another of those things.

Thus fought the heroes, tranquil their admirable hearts, violent their swords, resigned to kill and to die.