Jorge Luis Borges Quotes

So plant your own gardens and decorate your own soul, instead of waiting for someone to bring you flowers.

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

Don't talk unless you can improve the silence.

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.

I cannot sleep unless I am surrounded by books.

The worst labyrinth is not that intricate form that can entrap us forever, but a single and precise straight line

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.

Nothing is built on stone; all is built on sand, but we must build as if the sand were stone.

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.

Truth never penetrates an unwilling mind.

The original is unfaithful to the translation.

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.

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.

Dictatorships foster oppression, dictatorships foster servitude, dictatorships foster cruelty; more abominable is the fact that they foster idiocy.

We accept reality so readily - perhaps because we sense that nothing is real.

Soccer is popular because stupidity is popular.

What you really value is what you miss, not what you have.

The future is inevitable and precise, but it may not occur. God lurks in the gaps.

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.

Art always opts for the individual, the concrete; art is not Platonic.

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.

I gazed at every mirror on the planet, not one gave back my reflection.

I owe the discovery of Uqbar to the conjunction of a mirror and an encyclopedia.

La duda es uno de los nombres de la inteligencia.

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.

Reality is not always probable, or likely.

Reality is partial to symmetry and slight anachronisms

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

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.

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.

The minotaur more than justifies the existence of the labyrinth.

I have committed the worst of sins one can commit... I have not been happy.

May Heaven exist, even if my place is Hell.

Life itself is a quotation.

I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.

The future has no other reality than as present hope, and the past is no more than present memory.

To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god.

The Falklands thing was a fight between two bald men over a comb.

Doubt is one of the names of intelligence.

I foresee that man will resign himself each day to new abominations, and soon that only bandits and soldiers will be left...

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.

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

I saw all the mirrors on earth and none of them reflected me.

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.

A writer's work is the product of laziness.

A book is not an isolated being: it is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships

The mind was dreaming. The world was its dream.

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.

Perhaps the apparent favor of the universe is no more than the crocodile grin of a Doberman breathing hard and about to be hungry?

Loneliness does not worry me; life is difficult enough, putting up with yourself and with your own habits.