1.
So plant your own gardens and decorate your own soul, instead of waiting for someone to bring you flowers.
Jorge Luis Borges
Cultivate your own dreams and adorn your spirit, rather than expecting someone else to bestow you with blossoms.
2.
Being with you and not being with you is the only way I have to measure time.
Jorge Luis Borges
'Having you in my life and not having you in my life is the only way I keep track of time.'
3.
Don't talk unless you can improve the silence.
Jorge Luis Borges
Be silent unless you have something meaningful to say.
4.
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
5.
I cannot sleep unless I am surrounded by books.
Jorge Luis Borges
6.
The worst labyrinth is not that intricate form that can entrap us forever, but a single and precise straight line
Jorge Luis Borges
7.
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.
Jorge Luis Borges
8.
Nothing is built on stone; all is built on sand, but we must build as if the sand were stone.
Jorge Luis Borges
9.
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
10.
Truth never penetrates an unwilling mind.
Jorge Luis Borges
11.
The original is unfaithful to the translation.
Jorge Luis Borges
12.
Being an agnostic means all things are possible, even God, even the Holy Trinity. This world is so strange that anything may happen, or may not happen. Being an agnostic makes me live in a larger, a more fantastic kind of world, almost uncanny. It makes me more tolerant.
Jorge Luis Borges
13.
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.
Jorge Luis Borges
14.
Dictatorships foster oppression, dictatorships foster servitude, dictatorships foster cruelty; more abominable is the fact that they foster idiocy.
Jorge Luis Borges
15.
We accept reality so readily - perhaps because we sense that nothing is real.
Jorge Luis Borges
16.
Soccer is popular because stupidity is popular.
Jorge Luis Borges
17.
What you really value is what you miss, not what you have.
Jorge Luis Borges
18.
The future is inevitable and precise, but it may not occur. God lurks in the gaps.
Jorge Luis Borges
19.
The tango is a direct expression of something that poets have often tried to state in words: the belief that a fight may be a celebration.
Jorge Luis Borges
20.
Art always opts for the individual, the concrete; art is not Platonic.
Jorge Luis Borges
21.
I have preferred to teach my students not English literature but my love for certain authors, or, even better, certain pages, or even better than that, certain lines. One falls in love with a line, then with a page, then with an author. Well, why not? It is a beautiful process.
Jorge Luis Borges
22.
I gazed at every mirror on the planet, not one gave back my reflection.
Jorge Luis Borges
23.
I owe the discovery of Uqbar to the conjunction of a mirror and an encyclopedia.
Jorge Luis Borges
24.
La duda es uno de los nombres de la inteligencia.
Jorge Luis Borges
25.
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
26.
Reality is not always probable, or likely.
Jorge Luis Borges
27.
Reality is partial to symmetry and slight anachronisms
Jorge Luis Borges
28.
Let others pride themselves about how many pages they have written; I'd rather boast about the ones I've read.
Jorge Luis Borges
29.
No one is a poet from eight to twelve and from two to six. Whoever is a poet is one always, and continually assaulted by poetry.
Jorge Luis Borges
30.
There is nothing in the world that is not mysterious, but the mystery is more evident in certain things than in others: in the sea, in the eyes of the elders, in the color yellow, and in music.
Jorge Luis Borges
31.
The minotaur more than justifies the existence of the labyrinth.
Jorge Luis Borges
32.
I have committed the worst of sins one can commit... I have not been happy.
Jorge Luis Borges
33.
May Heaven exist, even if my place is Hell.
Jorge Luis Borges
34.
Life itself is a quotation.
Jorge Luis Borges
35.
I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.
Jorge Luis Borges
36.
The future has no other reality than as present hope, and the past is no more than present memory.
Jorge Luis Borges
37.
To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god.
Jorge Luis Borges
38.
The Falklands thing was a fight between two bald men over a comb.
Jorge Luis Borges
39.
Doubt is one of the names of intelligence.
Jorge Luis Borges
40.
I foresee that man will resign himself each day to new abominations, and soon that only bandits and soldiers will be left...
Jorge Luis Borges
41.
Time can't be measured in days the way money is measured in pesos and centavos, because all pesos are equal, while every day, perhaps every hour, is different.
Jorge Luis Borges
42.
When writers die they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarnation.
Jorge Luis Borges
43.
I saw all the mirrors on earth and none of them reflected me.
Jorge Luis Borges
44.
For me, beauty is a physical sensation, something we feel with our whole body. It is not the result of judgement. We do not arrive at it by way of rules. We either feel beauty or we don't.
Jorge Luis Borges
45.
A writer's work is the product of laziness.
Jorge Luis Borges
46.
A book is not an isolated being: it is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships
Jorge Luis Borges
47.
The mind was dreaming. The world was its dream.
Jorge Luis Borges
48.
There is an hour of the afternoon when the plain is on the verge of saying something. It never says, or perhaps it says it infinitely, or perhaps we do not understand it, or we understand it and it is untranslatable as music.
Jorge Luis Borges
49.
Perhaps the apparent favor of the universe is no more than the crocodile grin of a Doberman breathing hard and about to be hungry?
Jorge Luis Borges
50.
Loneliness does not worry me; life is difficult enough, putting up with yourself and with your own habits.
Jorge Luis Borges
