Jorge Luis Borges quotes - page 6

Thus my life is a flight and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to him. (Jorge Luis Borges)
I reflected that everything happens to a man precisely, precisely now. Centuries of centuries and only in the present do things happen; countless men in the air, on the face of the earth and the sea, and all that really is happening is happening to me... View quote
Jorge Luis Borges
It's a shame that we have to choose between two such second-rate countries as the USSR and the USA. View quote
Jorge Luis Borges
Another school declares that all time has already transpired and that our life is only the crepuscular and no doubt falsified and mutilated memory or reflection of an irrecoverable process. View quote
Jorge Luis Borges
God must not engage in theology. The writer must not destroy by human reasonings the faith that art requires of us. View quote
Jorge Luis Borges
It also occurred to him that throughout history, humankind has told two stories: the story of a lost ship sailing the Mediterranean seas in quest of a beloved isle, and the story of a god who allows himself to be crucified on Golgotha. View quote
Jorge Luis Borges
When I wake up, I wake to something worse. It's the astonishment of being myself. View quote
Jorge Luis Borges
I saw the delicate bone structure of a hand; I saw the survivors of a battle sending out post cards... I saw the oblique shadow of some ferns on the floor of a hot-house; I saw tigers, emboli, bison, ground swells and armies; I saw all the ants in the world. View quote
Jorge Luis Borges
Villari took no notice of them because the idea of a coincidence between art and reality was alien to him. Unlike people who read novels, he never saw himself as a character in a work of art. View quote
Jorge Luis Borges
It is known that Whistler when asked how long it took him to paint one of his "nocturnes" answered: "All of my life." With the same rigor he could have said that all of the centuries that preceded the moment when he painted were necessary. From that correct application of the law of causality it follows that the slightest event presupposes the inconceivable universe and, conversely, that the universe needs even the slightest of events. View quote
Jorge Luis Borges
I thought of a labyrinth of labyrinths, of one sinuous spreading labyrinth that would encompass the past and the future and in some way involve the stars. (Jorge Luis Borges)
The geometry of Tlön comprises two somewhat different disciplines: the visual and the tactile. The latter corresponds to our own geometry and is subordinated to the first. View quote
Jorge Luis Borges
His many years had reduced and polished him the way water smooths and polishes a stone or generations of men polish a proverb. View quote
Jorge Luis Borges
It is no exaggeration to state that the classic culture of Tlön comprises only one discipline: psychology. All others are subordinated to it. I have said that the men of this planet conceive the universe as a series of mental processes which do not develop in space but successively in time. View quote
Jorge Luis Borges
How else can one threaten, other than with death? The interesting, the original thing, would be to threaten someone with immortality. View quote
Jorge Luis Borges
Razed the garden, profaned the chalices and the altars, by horse the Huns broke into the Monastic library and they tore the incomprehensible books and they vituperated them and they burnt them, fearing their symbols and characters might be concealing secret blasphemies against their God, who was an iron scimitar... View quote
Jorge Luis Borges
There are people who barely feel poetry, and they are generally dedicated to teaching it. View quote
Jorge Luis Borges
I tried mescaline and cocaine in my youth, but I immediately switched to mint candy, which was more stimulating. I am not interested in drugs if they produce the same effects as alcohol. A drunkard is evidently ridiculous. I have been drunk some times, and I remember them as horrible experiences for me and everyone else. View quote
Jorge Luis Borges
Wilde was not a great poet nor a consummate prose writer. He was a very astute Irishman who encompassed in epigrams an esthetic credo which others before him scattered in the space of long pages. He was an enfant terrible. View quote
Jorge Luis Borges
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. View quote
Jorge Luis Borges
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)
I have known that thing the Greeks knew not – uncertainty. View quote
Jorge Luis Borges
Of course, like all young men, I tried to be as unhappy as I could - a kind of Hamlet and Raskolnikov rolled into one. View quote
Jorge Luis Borges
He transforms all concepts into incommunicable, solidified objects. To refute him is to become contaminated with unreality. View quote
Jorge Luis Borges
One of the heresiarchs of Uqbar had stated that mirrors and copulation are abominable, since they both multiply the numbers of man. View quote
Jorge Luis Borges