Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
As a boy, I used to marvel that the letters in a closed book did not get scrambled and lost overnight.
Jorge Luis Borges
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
Jorge Luis Borges
Age: 86 †
Born: 1899
Born: August 24
Died: 1986
Died: March 26
Librarian
Literary Critic
Poet
Screenwriter
Translator
Writer
Buenos Ayres
Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges
Chorche Louis Borches
Jorge Luis Borges Acevedo
Horhe Luis Borhes
J. L. Borges
H. Bustos Domecq
Khorkhe Luyis Borkhes
Borges
Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo
Book
Scrambled
Marvel
Overnight
Closed
Letters
Boys
Lost
Used
More quotes by Jorge Luis Borges
The web of time - the strands of which approach one another, bifurcate, intersect, or ignore each other through the centuries - embraces every possibility. We do not exist in most of them. In some you exist and not I, while in others I do, and you do not, and in yet others both of us exist.
Jorge Luis Borges
Thus my life is a flight and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to him.
Jorge Luis Borges
The flattery of posterity is not worth much more than contemporary flattery, which is worth nothing.
Jorge Luis Borges
The tango is a direct expression of something that poets have often tried to state in words: the belief that a fight may be a celebration.
Jorge Luis Borges
I gazed at every mirror on the planet, not one gave back my reflection.
Jorge Luis Borges
My friends tell me that I am an intruder, that I don't really write when I attempt poetry. But those of my friends who write in prose say that I'm no writer when I attempt prose. So really I don't know what to do, I'm in a quandary.
Jorge Luis Borges
The visible universe was an illusion or, more precisely, a sophism. Mirrors and fatherhood are abominable because they multiply it and extend it.
Jorge Luis Borges
When you reach my age, you realize you couldn't have done things very much better or much worse than you did them in the first place.
Jorge Luis Borges
If a writer disbelieves what he is writing, then he can hardly expect his reader to believe it.
Jorge Luis Borges
I believe that in time we will have reached the point where we will deserve to be free of government.
Jorge Luis Borges
Then he reflected that reality does not usually coincide with our anticipation of it with a logic of his own he inferred that to forsee a circumstantial detail is to prevent its happening. Trusting in this weak magic, he invented, so that they would not happen, the most gruesome details.
Jorge Luis Borges
Every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.
Jorge Luis Borges
The certainty that everything has already been written annuls us, or renders us phantasmal.
Jorge Luis Borges
In the course of a life devoted less to living than to reading, I have verified many times that literary intentions and theories are nothing more than stimuli and that the final work usually ignores or even contradicts them.
Jorge Luis Borges
I suppose every poet has his own private mythology. Maybe he's unaware of it. People tell me that I have evolved a private mythology of tigers, of blades, of labyrinths, and Im unaware of the fact this is so. My readers are finding it all the time. But I think perhaps that is the duty of poet.
Jorge Luis Borges
To bless thine enemy is a good way to satisfy thy vanity.
Jorge Luis Borges
Reality is partial to symmetry and slight anachronisms
Jorge Luis Borges
I...have always known that my destiny was, above all, a literary destiny — that bad things and some good things would happen to me, but that, in the long run, all of it would be converted into words. Particularly the bad things, since happiness does not need to be transformed: happiness is its own end.
Jorge Luis Borges
The time for your labor has been granted.
Jorge Luis Borges
Heaven and hell seem out of proportion to me: the actions of men do not deserve so much.
Jorge Luis Borges
