Quotes By Jorge Luis Borges

To die for a religion is easier than to live it absolutely.

Writing is nothing more than a guided dream.

In the order of literature, as in others, there is no act that is not the coronation of an infinite series of causes and the source of an infinite series of effects.

There is a concept that is the corrupter and destroyer of all others. I speak not of Evil, whose limited empire is that of ethics; I speak of the infinite.

In general, every country has the language it deserves.

I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.

Like all writers, he measured the achievements of others by what they had accomplished, asking of them that they measure him by what he envisaged or planned.

Reality is not always probable, or likely.

The original is unfaithful to the translation.

Time is the substance from which I am made. Time is a river which carries me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger that devours me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire.

To be immortal is commonplace; except for man, all creatures are immortal, for they are ignorant of death; what is divine, terrible, incomprehensible, is to know that one is immortal.

One concept corrupts and confuses the others. I am not speaking of the Evil whose limited sphere is ethics; I am speaking of the infinite.

Art always opts for the individual, the concrete; art is not Platonic.

Poetry remembers that it was an oral art before it was a written art.

The fact is that all writers create their precursors. Their work modifies our conception of the past, just as it is bound to modify the future.

Any life is made up of a single moment, the moment in which a man finds out, once and for all, who he is.

The central problem of novel-writing is causality.

I have known uncertainty: a state unknown to the Greeks.

Life and death have been lacking in my life.

I cannot walk through the suburbs in the solitude of the night without thinking that the night pleases us because it suppresses idle details, just as our memory does.

Like all those possessing a library, Aurelian was aware that he was guilty of not knowing his in its entirety.

The truth is that we live out our lives putting off all that can be put off; perhaps we all know deep down that we are immortal and that sooner or later all men will do and know all things.

To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god.

Reading is an activity subsequent to writing: more resigned, more civil, more intellectual.

I foresee that man will resign himself each day to new abominations, and soon that only bandits and soldiers will be left.

Nothing is built on stone; all is built on sand, but we must build as if the sand were stone.

The Falklands thing was a fight between two bald men over a comb.

Democracy is an abuse of statistics.

The flattery of posterity is not worth much more than contemporary flattery, which is worth nothing.

Life itself is a quotation.