Jorge Luis Borges quotes - page 3

Universal history is the history of a few metaphors. (Jorge Luis Borges)
The minotaur more than justifies the existence of the labyrinth.
Jorge Luis Borges
Every novel is an ideal plane inserted into the realm of reality.
Jorge Luis Borges
The heresies we should fear are those which can be confused with orthodoxy.
Jorge Luis Borges
The time for your labor has been granted.
Jorge Luis Borges
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
We (the indivisible divinity that works in us) have dreamed the world. We have dreamed it resistant, mysterious, visible, ubiquitous in space and firm in time, but we have allowed slight, and eternal, bits of the irrational to form part of its architecture so as to know that it is false.
Jorge Luis Borges
I have sometimes suspected that the only thing that holds no mystery is happiness, because it is its own justification.
Jorge Luis Borges
Time forks perpetually toward innumerable futures. In one of them I am your enemy.
Jorge Luis Borges
Imprecision is tolerable and verisimilar in literature, because we always tend towards it in life.
Jorge Luis Borges
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)
That one individual should awaken in another memories that belong to still a third is an obvious paradox.
Jorge Luis Borges
I owe the discovery of Uqbar to the conjunction of a mirror and an encyclopedia.
Jorge Luis Borges
My advanced age has taught me the resignation of being Borges.
Jorge Luis Borges
I foresee that man will resign himself each day to more atrocious undertakings; soon there will be no one but warriors and brigands; I give them this counsel: The author of an atrocious undertaking ought to imagine that he has already accomplished it, ought to impose upon himself a future as irrevocable as the past.
Jorge Luis Borges
Films are even stranger, for what we are seeing are not disguised people but photographs of disguised people, and yet we believe them while the film is being shown.
Jorge Luis Borges
There is no exercise of the intellect which is not, in the final analysis, useless. A philosophical doctrine begins as a plausible description of the universe; with the passage of the years it becomes a mere chapter - if not a paragraph or a name - in the history of philosophy.
Jorge Luis Borges
It seemed incredible to me that day without premonitions or symbols should be the one of my inexorable death.
Jorge Luis Borges
Writing long books is a laborious and impoverishing act of foolishness: expanding in five hundred pages an idea that could be perfectly explained in a few minutes. A better procedure is to pretend that those books already exist and to offer a summary, a commentary.
Jorge Luis Borges
When one confesses to an act, one ceases to be an actor in it and becomes its witness, becomes a man that observes and narrates it and no longer the man that performed it.
Jorge Luis Borges
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)
The future is inevitable and precise, but it may not occur. God lurks in the gaps.
Jorge Luis Borges
I know of one semibarbarous zone whose librarians repudiate the "vain and superstitious habit" of trying to find sense in books, equating such a quest with attempting to find meaning in dreams or in the chaotic lines on the palms of one's hand.
Jorge Luis Borges
The original is unfaithful to the translation.
Jorge Luis Borges
Do you want to see what human eyes have never seen? Look at the moon. Do you want to hear what ears have never heard? Listen to the bird's cry. Do you want to touch what hands have never touched? Touch the earth. Verily I say that God is about to create the world.
Jorge Luis Borges