Jorge Luis Borges Quotes

Jorge Luis Borges is an important literary figure of the 20th century. He was a poet, essayist, translator, letter writer, and short story writer. Authors like Cervantes, Kafka and Chesterton are known influences on his works. Here are a few quotes from Jorge Luis Borges.

• "Being with you and not being with you is the only way I have to measure time."
  - Jorge Luis Borges, "The Threatened One"
  
  
• "Do you want to see what human eyes have never seen? Look at the moon. Do you want to hear what ears have never heard? Listen to the bird's cry. Do you want to touch what hands have never touched? Touch the earth. Verily I say that God is about to create the world."
  - Jorge Luis Borges, "The Theologians"
  
  
• "For myth is at the beginning of literature, and also at its end."
  - Jorge Luis Borges, "Parable of Cervantes and Don Quixote"
  
  
• "I cannot think it unlikely that there is such a total book on some shelf in the universe. I pray to the unknown gods that some man--even a single man, tens of centuries ago--has perused and read this book. If the honor and wisdom and joy of such a reading are not to be my own, then let them be for others. Let heaven exist, though my own place may be in hell. Let me be tortured and battered and annihilated, but let there be one instant, one creature, wherein thy enormous Library may find its justification."
  - Jorge Luis Borges, "The Library of Babel"
  
  
• "I foresee that man will resign himself each day to new abominations, and soon that only bandits and soldiers will be left."
  - Jorge Luis Borges, "The Garden of Forking Paths"
  
  
• "I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library."
  - Jorge Luis Borges, "Poema de los Dones"
  
  
• "In adultery, there is usually tenderness and self-sacrifice; in murder, courage; in profanation and blasphemy, a certain satanic splendour. Judas elected those offences unvisited by any virtues: abuse of confidence and informing."
  - Jorge Luis Borges, "Three Versions of Judas"
  
  
• "In life, he suffered from a sense of unreality, as do many Englishmen."
  - Jorge Luis Borges, "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius"
  
  
• "It seemed incredible that this day, a day without warnings or omens, might be that of my implacable death."
  - Jorge Luis Borges, "The Garden of Forking Paths"
  
  
• "Like all those possessing a library, Aurelian was aware that he was guilty of not knowing his in its entirety."
  - Jorge Luis Borges, "The Theologians"
  
  
• "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, "The Secret Miracle"
  
  
• "My advanced age has taught me the resignation of being Borges."
  - Jorge Luis Borges, "El informe de Brodie"
  
  
• "No one is anyone, one single immortal man is all men. Like Cornelius Agrippa, I am god, I am hero, I am philosopher, I am demon and I am world, which is a tedious way of saying that I do not exist."
  - Jorge Luis Borges, "The Immortal"
  
  
• "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."
  - Jorge Luis Borges, "The South"
  
  
• "That history should have imitated history was already sufficiently marvellous; that history should imitate literature is inconceivable."
  - Jorge Luis Borges, "Theme of the Traitor and Hero"
  
  
• "The execution was set for the 29th of March, at nine in the morning. This delay was due to a desire on the part of the authorities to act slowly and impersonally, in the manner of planets or vegetables."
  - Jorge Luis Borges, "The Secret Miracle"
  
  
• "The heresies we should fear are those which can be confused with orthodoxy."
  - Jorge Luis Borges, "The Theologians"
  
  
• "There are no moral or intellectual merits. Homer composed the Odyssey; if we postulate an infinite period of time, with infinite circumstances and changes, the impossible thing is not to compose the Odyssey, at least once."
  - Jorge Luis Borges, "The Immortal"
  
  
• "There is no intellectual exercise which is not ultimately useless."
  - Jorge Luis Borges, "Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote"
  
  
• "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."
  - Jorge Luis Borges, "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius"
  
  
• "This web of time--the strands of which approach one another, bifurcate, intersect or ignore eachother through the centuries--embrace every posibility."
  - Jorge Luis Borges, "The Garden of Forking Paths"
  
  
• "Time broadens the scope of verses and I know of some which, like music, are everything for all men."
  - Jorge Luis Borges, "Averroës' Search"
  
  
• "To die for a religion is easier than to live it absolutely."
  - Jorge Luis Borges, "Deutsches Requiem"
  
  
• "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."
  - Jorge Luis Borges, "The Waiting"
  
  
• "What one man does is something done, in some measure, by all men. For that reason a disobedience committed in a garden contaminates the human race; for that reason it is not unjust that the crucifixion of a single Jew suffices to save it."
  - Jorge Luis Borges, "The Form of the Sword"
  
  
• "Whosoever would undertake some atrocious enterprise should act as if it were already accomplished, should impose upon himself a future as irrevocable as the past."
  - Jorge Luis Borges, "The Garden of Forking Paths"
  
  
• "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 Waiting"
  
  
• "You will reply that reality hasn't the slightest need to be of interest. And I'll answer you that reality may avoid the obligation to be interesting, but that hypothesis may not"
  - Jorge Luis Borges, "Death and the Compass"