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Jorge Luis Borges

156 quotes

“Fame is a form—perhaps the worst form—of incomprehension.”
Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) said by 1986 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Thinking, meditating, imagining are not anomalous acts – they are the normal respiration of the intelligence. To glorify the occasional exercise of that function, to treasure beyond price ancient and foreign thoughts, to recall with incredulous awe what some doctor universalis thought, is to confess our own languor, or our own barbarie. Every man should be capable of all ideas, and I believe that in the future he shall be.”
Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) said by 1986 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) first seen 1944 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Funes the Memorious" ["Funes El Memorioso"] (1944); also published in Labyrinths (1964)
“That history should have imitated history was already sufficiently marvellous; that history should imitate literature is inconceivable....”
Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) said by 1986 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) said by 1986 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It's possible, but not interesting," Lonnrot answered. "You will reply that reality hasn't the slightest need to be of interest. And I'll answer you that reality may avoid the obligation to be interesting, but that hypotheses may not. In the hypothesis you have postulated, chance intervenes largely. Here lies a dead rabbi; I should prefer a purely rabbinical explanation; not the imaginary mischances of an imaginary robber.”
Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) said by 1986 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Maybe this crime belongs to the history of Jewish superstitions," murmmured Lönnrot. "Like Christianity," the editor put in.”
Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) said by 1986 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The execution was set for the 29th of March, at nine in the morning. This delay was due to a desire on the part of the authorities to act slowly and impersonally, in the manner of planets or vegetables.”
Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) said by 1986 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Like every writer, he measured the virtues of other writers by their performance, and asked that they measure him by what he conjectured or planned.”
Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) said by 1986 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The time for your labor has been granted.”
Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) said by 1986 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Toward dawn, he dreamed that he was in hiding, in one of the naves of the Clementine Library. What are you looking for? a librarian wearing dark glasses asked him. I'm looking for God, Hladik replied. God, the librarian said, is in one of the letters on one of the pages of one of the four hundred thousand volumes in the Clementine. My parents and my parents' parents searched for that letter; I myself have gone blind searching for it.”
Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) said by 1986 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In adultery, there is usually tenderness and self-sacrifice; in murder, courage; in profanation and blasphemy, a certain satanic splendour. Judas elected those offences unvisited by any virtues: abuse of confidence and informing.”
Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) said by 1986 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) first seen 1949 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The South". Cf. "The Man on the Threshold", in The Aleph (1949)
“If Dahlmann was without hope, he was also without fear. As he crossed the threshold, he felt that to die in a knife fight, under the open sky, and going forward to the attack, would have been a liberation, a joy, and a festive occasion, on the first night in the sanitarium, when they stuck him with the needle. He felt that if he had been able to choose, then, or to dream his death, this would have been the death he would have chosen or dreamt. Firmly clutching his knife, which he perhaps would not know how to wield, Dahlmann went out into the plain.”
Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) said by 1986 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“And yet, and yet … Negar la sucesión temporal, negar el yo, negar el universo astronómico, son desesperaciones aparentes y consuelos secretos. Nuestro destino no es espantoso por irreal: es espantoso porque es irreversible y de hierro. El tiempo es la sustancia de que estoy hecho. El tiempo es un río que me arrebata, pero yo soy el río; es un tigre que me destroza, pero yo soy el tigre; es un fuego que me consume, pero yo soy el fuego. El mundo desgraciadamente es real; yo, desgraciadamente, soy Borges.”
Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) first seen 1946 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: A New Refutation of Time" (1946) ["Nueva refutación del tiempo"]
“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.”
Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) said by 1986 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Music, states of happiness, mythology, faces belabored by time, certain twilights and certain places try to tell us something, or have said something we should not have missed, or are about to say something; this imminence of a revelation which does not occur is, perhaps, the aesthetic phenomenon.”
Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) first seen 1950 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Wall and the Books" ["La muralla y los libros"] (1950)
“Universal history is the history of a few metaphors.”
Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) first seen 1951 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Pascal’s Sphere" ["La esfera de Pascal"] (1951)
“In the course of a life devoted less to living than to reading, I have verified many times that literary intentions and theories are nothing more than stimuli and that the final work usually ignores or even contradicts them.”
Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) said by 1986 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) said by 1986 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In the critic's vocabulary, the word "precursor" is indispensable, but it should be cleansed of all connotations of polemic or rivalry. The fact is that every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.”
Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) first seen 1964 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Kafka and His Precursors" ["Kafka y sus precursores"], as translated in Labyrinths (1964)
“A book is more than a verbal structure or series of verbal structures; it is the dialogue it establishes with its reader and the intonation it imposes upon his voice and the changing and durable images it leaves in his memory. A book is not an isolated being: it is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships.”
Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) first seen 1951 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Note on (toward) Bernard Shaw" ["Nota sobre (hacia) Bernard Shaw"] (1951)
“Literature is not exhaustible, for the sufficient and simple reason that a single book is not. A book is not an isolated entity: it is a narration, an axis of innumerable narrations. One literature differs from another, either before or after it, not so much because of the text as for the manner in which it is read.”
Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) said by 1986 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Variant translation: A book is not an autonomous entity: it is a relation, an axis of innumerable relations. One literature differs from another, be it earlier or later, not because of the texts but because of the way t…
“The future is inevitable and precise, but it may not occur. God lurks in the gaps.”
Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) said by 1986 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god.”
Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) said by 1986 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) first seen 1895 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Flower of Coleridge" ["La flor de Coleridge"] — The title of this work makes reference to a line by Samuel Coleridge in Anima Poetæ : From the Unpublished Note-books of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1895), p. 282 : "If a…
“It is clear that there is no classification of the Universe that is not arbitrary and full of conjectures. The reason for this is very simple: we do not know what kind of thing the universe is.”
Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) said by 1986 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Cabe ir más lejos; cabe sospechar que no hay universo en el sentido orgánico, unificador, que tiene esa ambiciosa palabra. Si lo hay, falta conjeturar su propósito; falta conjeturar las palabras, las definiciones, las etimologías, las sinonimias, del secreto diccionario de Dios.”
Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) said by 1986 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The impossibility of penetrating the divine pattern of the universe cannot stop us from planning human patterns, even though we are conscious they are not definitive. The analytic language of Wilkins is not the least admirable of such patterns.”
Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) said by 1986 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I have suspected that history, real history, is more modest and that its essential dates may be, for a long time, secret. A Chinese prose writer has observed that the unicorn, because of its own anomaly, will pass unnoticed. Our eyes see what they are accustomed to seeing. Tacitus did not perceive the Crucifixion, although his book recorded it.”
Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) said by 1986 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There is a flavor that our time (perhaps surfeited by the clumsy imitations of professional patriots) does not usually perceive without some suspicion: the fundamental flavor of the heroic.”
Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) said by 1986 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Myth is at the beginning of literature, and also at its end.”
Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) first seen 1955 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Parable of Cervantes and Don Quixote" (January 1955)
“Yo, que me figuraba el Paraíso / Bajo la especie de una biblioteca. I have always imagined Paradise as a kind of library.”
Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) said by 1986 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The flattery of posterity is not worth much more than contemporary flattery, which is worth nothing.”
Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) said by 1986 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Un hombre se propone la tarea de dibujar el mundo. A lo largo de los años puebla un espacio con imágenes de provincias, de reinos, de montañas, de bahías, de naves, de islas, de peces, de habitaciones, de instrumentos, de astros, de caballos y de personas. Poco antes de morir, descubre que ese paciente laberinto de líneas traza la imagen de su cara.”
Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) said by 1986 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Well, [Lorca had] a gift for gab. For example, he makes striking metaphors, but I think he makes striking metaphors for him, because I think that his world was mostly verbal. I think that he was fond of playing words against each other, the contrast of words, but I wonder if he knew what he was doing.”
Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) first seen 1968 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Richard Burgin, Conversations with Jorge Luis Borges, Holt, Rhinehart, & Winston, 1968. Pages 93-94.
Also quoted by: Federico García Lorca
“This was the first time Remington rifles were used in the Argentine, and it tickles my fancy to think that the firm that shaves me every morning bears the same name as the one that killed my grandfather.”
Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) said by 1986 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Of course, like all young men, I tried to be as unhappy as I could — a kind of Hamlet and Raskolnikov rolled into one.”
Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) said by 1986 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I found America the friendliest, most forgiving, and most generous nation I had ever visited. We South Americans tend to think of things in terms of convenience, whereas people in the United States approach things ethically. This — amateur Protestant that I am — I admired above all. It even helped me overlook skyscrapers, paper bags, television, plastics, and the unholy jungle of gadgets.”
Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) said by 1986 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Any time something is written against me, I not only share the sentiment but feel I could do the job far better myself. Perhaps I should advise would-be enemies to send me their grievances beforehand, with full assurance that they will receive my every aid and support. I have even secretly longed to write, under a pen name, a merciless tirade against myself.”
Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) said by 1986 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Some days past I have found a curious confirmation of the fact that what is truly native can and often does dispense with local color; I found this confirmation in Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Gibbon observes that in the Arabian book par excellence, in the Koran, there are no camels; I believe if there were any doubt as to the authenticity of the Koran, this absence of camels would be sufficient to prove it is an Arabian work. It was written by Mohammed, and Mohammed, as an Arab, had no reason to know that camels were especially Arabian; for him they were part of reality, he had no reason to emphasize them; on the other hand, the first thing a falsifier, a tourist, an Arab nationalist would do is have a surfeit of camels, caravans of camels, on every page; but Mohammed, as an Arab, was unconcerned: he knew he could be an Arab without camels. I think we Argentines can emulate Mohammed, can believe in the possibility of being Argentine without abounding in local color.”
Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) first seen 1923 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Argentine Writer and Tradition", Fervor of Buenos Aires (1923)
“Everything would be in its blind volumes. Everything: the detailed history of the future, Aeschylus' The Egyptians, the exact number of times that the waters of the Ganges have reflected the flight of a falcon, the secret and true nature of Rome, the encyclopedia Novalis would have constructed, my dreams and half-dreams at dawn on August 14, 1934, the proof of Pierre Fermat's theorem, the unwritten chapters of Edwin Drood, those same chapters translated into the language spoken by the Garamantes, the paradoxes Berkeley invented concerning Time but didn't publish, Urizen's books of iron, the premature epiphanies of Stephen Dedalus, which would be meaningless before a cycle of a thousand years, the Gnostic Gospel of Basilides, the song the sirens sang, the complete catalog of the Library, the proof of the inaccuracy of that catalog. Everything: but for every sensible line or accurate fact there would be millions of meaningless cacophonies, verbal farragoes, and babblings. Everything: but all the generations of mankind could pass before the dizzying shelves—shelves that obliterate the day and on which chaos lies—ever reward them with a tolerable page.”
Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) first seen 1939 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Universal Library" (1939)
“From these two incontrovertible premises he deduced that the Library is total and that its shelves register all the possible combinations of the twenty-odd orthographical symbols (a number which, though extremely vast, is not infinite). Everything: the minutely detailed history of the future, the archangels' autobiographies, the faithful catalogues of the Library, thousands and thousands of false catalogues, the demonstration of the fallacy of those catalogues, the demonstration of the fallacy of the true catalogue, the Gnostic gospel of Basilides, the commentary on that gospel, the commentary on the commentary on that gospel, the true story of your death, the translation of every book in all languages, the interpolations of every book in all books.”
Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) first seen 1941 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Library of Babel" ["La Biblioteca de Babel"] (1941), tr. James E. Irby
“In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.<!--”
Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) first seen 1946 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On Exactitude in Science, as translated by Andrew Hurley, in Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions (1999); first published in Los Anales de Buenos Aires, año 1, no. 3 (March 1946)
“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.”
Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) first seen 1957 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Book of Imaginary Beings (1957), as translated by Norman Thomas di Giovanni
“I turn to the most promising example: the bird. The habit of flocking; smallness; similarity of traits; their ancient connection with the two twilights, the beginnings of days, and the endings; the fact of being more often heard than seen — all of this moves us to acknowledge the primacy of the species and the almost perfect nullity of individuals. Keats, entirely a stranger to error, could believe that the nightingale enchanting him was the same one Ruth heard amid the alien corn of Bethlehem in Judah; Stevenson posits a single bird that consumes the centuries: "the nightingale that devours time." Schopenhauer — impassioned, lucid Schopenhauer — provides a reason: the pure corporeal immediacy in which animals live, oblivious to death and memory. He then adds, not without a smile: Whoever hears me assert that the grey cat playing just now in the yard is the same one that did jumps and tricks there five hundred years ago will think whatever he likes of me, but it is a stranger form of madness to imagine that the present-day cat is fundamentally an entirely different one.”
Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) said by 1986 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: A History of Eternity" in Selected Non-Fictions Vol. 1, (1999), edited by Eliot Weinberger
“The possibilities of the art of combination are not infinite, but they tend to be frightful. The Greeks engendered the chimera, a monster with heads of the lion, the dragon and the goat; the theologians of the second century, the Trinity, in which the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost are inextricably tied; the Chinese zoologists, the ti-yiang, a vermilion supernatural bird, endowed with six feet and four wings, but without a face or eyes; the geometers of the nineteenth century, the hypercube, a figure with four dimensions, which encloses an infinite number of cubes and has as its faces eight cubes and twenty-four squares. Hollywood has just enriched this vain museum of horrors: by means of an artistic malignity called dubbing, it proposes monsters that combine the illustrious features of Greta Garbo with the voice of Aldonza Lorenzo.”
Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) said by 1986 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Who are the inventors of Tlön? The plural is inevitable, because the hypothesis of a lone inventor — an infinite Leibniz laboring away darkly and modestly — has been unanimously discounted. It is conjectured that this brave new world is the work of a secret society of astronomers, biologists, engineers, metaphysicians, poets, chemists, algebraists, moralists, painters, geometers... directed by an obscure man of genius. Individuals mastering these diverse disciplines are abundant, but not so those capable of inventiveness and less so those capable of subordinating that inventiveness to a rigorous and systematic plan. This plan is so vast that each writer's contribution is infinitesimal. At first it was believed that Tlön was a mere chaos, and irresponsible license of the imagination; now it is known that it is a cosmos and that the intimate laws which govern it have been formulated, at least provisionally. Let it suffice for me to recall that the apparent contradictions of the Eleventh Volume are the fundamental basis for the proof that the other volumes exist, so lucid and exact is the order observed in it.”
Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) said by 1986 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“One of the schools of Tlön goes so far as to negate time; it reasons that the present is indefinite, that the future has no reality other than as a present hope, that the past has no reality other than as a present memory. Another school declares that all time has already transpired and that our life is only the crepuscular and no doubt falsified an mutilated memory or reflection of an irrecoverable process. Another, that the history of the universe — and in it our lives and the most tenuous detail of our lives — is the scripture produced by a subordinate god in order to communicate with a demon. Another, that the universe is comparable to those cryptographs in which not all the symbols are valid and that only what happens every three hundred nights is true. Another, that while we sleep here, we are awake elsewhere and that in this way every man is two men.”
Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) said by 1986 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The Garden of Forking Paths is an incomplete, but not false, image of the universe as Ts'ui Pên conceived it. In contrast to Newton and Schopenhauer, your ancestor did not believe in a uniform, absolute time. He believed in an infinite series of times, in a growing, dizzying net of divergent, convergent and parallel times. This network of times which approached one another, forked, broke off, or were unaware of one another for centuries, embraces all possibilities of time. We do not exist in the majority of these times; in some you exist, and not I; in others I, and not you; in others, both of us.”
Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) said by 1986 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source