Jorge Luis Borges Quotes

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

We spend our lives waiting for our book and it never comes.

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.

He thought that the rose was to be found in its own eternity and not in his words; and that we may mention or allude to a thing, but not express it.

I...have always known that my destiny was, above all, a literary destiny - that bad things and some good things would happen to me, but that, in the long run, all of it would be converted
into words. Particularly the bad things, since happiness does not need to be transformed: happiness is its own end.

How can we manage to illuminate the pathos of our lives?

Many of the characters are fools and they're always playing tricks on me
and treating me badly.

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.

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

... in art nothing is more secondary than the author's intentions.

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.

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

Whatever one man does, it is as if all men did it. For that reason, it is not unfair that one disobedience in a garden should contaminate all humanity; for that reason it is not unjust that the crucifixion of a single Jew should be sufficient to save it.

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.

I prayed aloud, less to plead for divine favor than to intimidate the tribe with articulate speech.

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

I cannot sleep unless I am surrounded by books.

Personally, I am a hedonistic reader; I have never read a book merely because it was ancient. I read books for the aesthetic emotions they offer me, and I ignore the commentaries and criticism.

Paradise will be a kind of library

Leaving behind the babble of the plaza, I enter the Library. I feel, almost physically, the gravitation of the books, the enveloping serenity of order, time magically dessicated and preserved.