Jorge Luis Borges quotes - page 5

Man's memory shapes Its own Eden within. (Jorge Luis Borges)
What man of us has never felt, walking through the twilight or writing down a date from his past, that he has lost something infinite?
Jorge Luis Borges
We accept reality so readily - perhaps because we sense that nothing is real.
Jorge Luis Borges
The dictionary is based on the hypothesis -- obviously an unproven one -- that languages are made up of equivalent synonyms.
Jorge Luis Borges
i walk slowly, like one who comes from so far away he doesn't expect to arrive.
Jorge Luis Borges
It means much to have loved, to have been happy, to have laid my hand on the living Garden, even for a day.
Jorge Luis Borges
I believe that in time we will have reached the point where we will deserve to be free of government.
Jorge Luis Borges
A book is not an isolated being: it is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships.
Jorge Luis Borges
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
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.
Jorge Luis Borges
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)
I think that the reader should enrich what he is reading. He should misunderstand the text; he should change it into something else.
Jorge Luis Borges
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.
Jorge Luis Borges
Fame is a form, perhaps the worst form, of incomprehension.
Jorge Luis Borges
It may be that universal history is the history of the different intonations given a handful of metaphors.
Jorge Luis Borges
The machinery of the world is far too complex for the simplicity of men.
Jorge Luis Borges
We have shared out, like thieves, the amazing treasures of days and nights.
Jorge Luis Borges
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.
Jorge Luis Borges
Loneliness does not worry me; life is difficult enough, putting up with yourself and with your own habits.
Jorge Luis Borges
It only takes two facing mirrors to build a labyrinth.
Jorge Luis Borges
The task of art is to transform what is continuously happening to us, to transform all of these things into symbols, into music, into something which can last in man's memory. That is our duty. If we don't fulfill it, we feel unhappy. (Jorge Luis Borges)
The certainty that everything has already been written annuls us, or renders us phantasmal.
Jorge Luis Borges
We are as ignorant of the meaning of the dragon as we are of the meaning of the universe.
Jorge Luis Borges
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
He consorted with prostitutes and poets... and with persons even worse.
Jorge Luis Borges