Jorge Luis Borges quotes - page 8

And yet, and yet . . . Denying temporal succession, denying the self, denying the astronomical universe, are apparent desperations and secret consolations. Our destiny is not frightful by being unreal; it is frightful because it is irreversible and iron-clad. Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire. The world, unfortunately, is real; I, unfortunately, am Borges. (Jorge Luis Borges)
We can suspect that there is no universe in the organic, unifying sense, that this ambitious term has. If there is a universe, its aim is not conjectured yet; we have not yet conjectured the words, the definitions, the etymologies, the synonyms, from the secret dictionary of God.
Jorge Luis Borges
Time is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire.
Jorge Luis Borges
I saw all the mirrors on earth and none of them reflected me.
Jorge Luis Borges
Hume noted for all time that Berkeley's arguments did not admit the slightest refutation nor did they cause the slightest conviction.
Jorge Luis Borges
One of the schools of Tlön goes so far as to negate time; it reasons that the present is indefinite, that the future has no reality other than as a present hope, that the past has no reality other than as a present memory.
Jorge Luis Borges
Gibbon observes that in the Arabian book par excellence, in the Koran, there are no camels; I believe if there were any doubt as to the authenticity of the Koran, this absence of camels would be sufficient to prove it is an Arabian work.
Jorge Luis Borges
Every one imagined two works; to no one did it occur that the book and the maze were one and the same thing.
Jorge Luis Borges
As I think of the many myths, there is one that is very harmful, and that is the myth of countries.
Jorge Luis Borges
This network of times which approached one another, forked, broke off, or were unaware of one another for centuries, embraces all possibilities of time.
Jorge Luis Borges
I would define the baroque as that style that deliberately exhausts (or tries to exhaust) its own possibilities, and that borders on self-caricature. (Jorge Luis Borges)
We do not know what the unicorn looks like.
Jorge Luis Borges
Time carries him as the river carries A leaf in the downstream water. No matter. The enchanted one insists And shapes God with delicate geometry.
Jorge Luis Borges
It is venturesome to think that a coordination of words (philosophies are nothing more than that) can resemble the universe very much.
Jorge Luis Borges
The metaphysicians of Tlön do not seek for the truth or even for verisimilitude, but rather for the astounding.
Jorge Luis Borges
In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.
Jorge Luis Borges
Any time something is written against me, I not only share the sentiment but feel I could do the job far better myself.
Jorge Luis Borges
Poetry always remembers that it was an oral art before it was a written art. It remembers that it was first song.
Jorge Luis Borges
I have suspected that history, real history, is more modest and that its essential dates may be, for a long time, secret. A Chinese prose writer has observed that the unicorn, because of its own anomaly, will pass unnoticed. Our eyes see what they are accustomed to seeing.
Jorge Luis Borges
Only one thing is more admirable than the admirable reply of the Saxon king: that an Icelander, a man of the lineage of the vanquished, has perpetuated the reply.
Jorge Luis Borges
Whoever hears me assert that the grey cat playing just now in the yard is the same one that did jumps and tricks there five hundred years ago will think whatever he likes of me, but it is a stranger form of madness to imagine that the present-day cat is fundamentally an entirely different one. (Jorge Luis Borges)
I think we Argentines can emulate Mohammed, can believe in the possibility of being Argentine without abounding in local color.
Jorge Luis Borges
It is universally held that the unicorn is a supernatural being and of auspicious omen; so say the odes, the annals, the biographies of worthies, and other texts whose authority is unimpeachable.
Jorge Luis Borges
Truly fine poetry must be read aloud.
Jorge Luis Borges
Who are the inventors of Tlön? The plural is inevitable, because the hypothesis of a lone inventor - an infinite Leibniz laboring away darkly and modestly - has been unanimously discounted. It is conjectured that this brave new world is the work of a secret society of astronomers, biologists, engineers, metaphysicians, poets, chemists, algebraists, moralists, painters, geometers... directed by an obscure man of genius. Individuals mastering these diverse disciplines are abundant, but not so those capable of inventiveness and less so those capable of subordinating that inventiveness to a rigorous and systematic plan.
Jorge Luis Borges