Jorge Luis Borges quotes - page 7

Every man should be capable of all ideas and I understand that in the future this will be the case. (Jorge Luis Borges)
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. View quote
Jorge Luis Borges
On September 20, 1792, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (who had accompanied the Duke of Weimar on a military expedition to Paris) saw the finest army of Europe inexplicably repulsed at Valmy by some French militiamen, and said to his disconcerted friends: "In this place and on this day, a new epoch in the history of the world is beginning, and we shall be able to say that we have been present at its origin." Since that time historic days have been numerous, and one of the tasks of governments (especially in Italy, Germany, and Russia) has been to fabricate them or to simulate them with an abundance of preconditioning propaganda followed by relentless publicity. View quote
Jorge Luis Borges
One thinker no less brilliant than the heresiarch himself, but in the orthodox tradition, advanced a most daring hypothesis. This felicitous supposition declared that there is only one Individual, and that this indivisible Individual is every one of the separate beings in the universe, and that these beings are the instruments and masks of divinity itself. View quote
Jorge Luis Borges
If the pages of this book contain some successful verse, the reader must excuse me the discourtesy of having usurped it first. Our nothingness differs little; it is a trivial and chance circumstance that you should be the reader of these exercises and I their author. View quote
Jorge Luis Borges
There is nothing very remarkable about being immortal; with the exception of mankind, all creatures are immortal, for they know nothing of death. What is divine, terrible, and incomprehensible is to know oneself immortal. View quote
Jorge Luis Borges
Thus fought the heroes, tranquil their admirable hearts, violent their swords, resigned to kill and to die. View quote
Jorge Luis Borges
In life, he suffered from a sense of unreality, as do many Englishmen. View quote
Jorge Luis Borges
The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite and perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries, with vast air shafts between, surrounded by very low railings. View quote
Jorge Luis Borges
In a riddle whose answer is chess, what is the only prohibited word? View quote
Jorge Luis Borges
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)
Coleridge observes that all men are born Aristotelians or Platonists. The latter feel that classes, orders, and genres are realities; the former, that they are generalizations. For the latter, language is nothing but an approximative set of symbols; for the former, it is the map of the universe. The Platonist knows that the universe is somehow a cosmos, an order; that order, for the Aristotelian, can be an error or a fiction of our partial knowledge. Across the latitudes and the epochs, the two immortal antagonists change their name and language: one is Parmenides, Plato, Spinoza, Kant, Francis Bradley; the other, Heraclitus, Aristotle, Locke, Hume, William James. View quote
Jorge Luis Borges
The vast ineptitude of his pretense would be a convincing proof that this was no fraud. View quote
Jorge Luis Borges
"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. View quote
Jorge Luis Borges
We all think that fate has dealt us a wretched sort of lot in life, and that others must be better. [...] I presume that in the heaven of the Blessèd there are those who believe that the advantages of that locale are much exaggerated by theologists, who have never been there themselves. View quote
Jorge Luis Borges
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. View quote
Jorge Luis Borges
Besides, time, which despoils castles, enriches verses... Time broadens the scope of verses and I know of some which, like music, are everything for all men. View quote
Jorge Luis Borges
I leave to the various futures (not to all) my garden of forking paths. View quote
Jorge Luis Borges
Yo, que me figuraba el Paraíso / Bajo la especie de una biblioteca. I have always imagined Paradise as a kind of library. View quote
Jorge Luis Borges
There is no combination of characters one can make - dhcmrlchtdj, for example - that the divine Library has not foreseen and that in one or more of its secret tongues does not hide a terrible significance. There is no syllable one can speak that is not filled with tenderness and terror, that is not, in one of those languages, the mighty name of a god. View quote
Jorge Luis Borges
Years of solitude had taught him that, in one's memory, all days tend to be the same, but that there is not a day, not even in jail or in the hospital, which does not bring surprises, which is not a translucent network of minimal surprises. (Jorge Luis Borges)
The event took place in the month of February of 1969, to the north of Boston, in Cambridge. I didn't write it down right away because my first intention was to forget it, so as not to lose my mind. View quote
Jorge Luis Borges
Being conservative is a way of being skeptic. View quote
Jorge Luis Borges
In the work of Ts'ui Pên, all possible outcomes occur; each one is the point of departure for other forkings. Sometimes, the paths of this labyrinth converge: for example, you arrive at this house, but in one of the possible pasts you are my enemy, in another, my friend. View quote
Jorge Luis Borges
"Maybe this crime belongs to the history of Jewish superstitions," murmmured Lönnrot. "Like Christianity," the editor put in. View quote
Jorge Luis Borges