Jorge Luis Borges
Master of metaphysical fiction and labyrinths
Most quoted
"A writer — and, I believe, generally all persons — must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art."
— from Interview with Richard Burgin, 1967
"A man sets out to draw the world. As the years go by, he peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, instruments, stars, horses, and individuals. A short time before he dies, he discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines traces the lineaments of his own face."
— from Epilogue to 'The Maker', 1960
"I foresee that man will resign himself each day to more atrocious undertakings; soon there will be no one but warriors and brigands; I give them this counsel: The author of an atrocious undertaking ought to imagine that he has already accomplished it, ought to impose upon himself a future as irrevocable as the past."
— from The Garden of Forking Paths, 1944
All quotes by Jorge Luis Borges (325)
I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.
Reality is not always probable or necessary.
A book is not an isolated being: it is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships.
To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god.
The original is unfaithful to the translation.
Don't talk unless you can improve the silence.
I am not sure that I exist, in fact. I am all the writers I have read, all the people I have met, all the women I have loved; all the cities I have visited.
Like all men of the city, I have lived my life in the library.
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 that devours me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire.
The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite and perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries.
Any life, however long and complicated it may be, is made up of a single moment — the moment in which a man finds out, once and for all, who he is.
I have committed the worst sin of all: I have not been happy.
There is no exercise better for the heart than reaching down and lifting people up.
The future is inevitable, but it is not necessarily what we expect.
Every man is a poet, a philosopher, a hero, a villain, a lover, a madman, a god, a devil.
The world, unfortunately, is real. I, unfortunately, am Borges.
I am a man of letters, not a man of action.
The fact is that every writer is a kind of schizophrenic, and the more he is a writer, the more he is a schizophrenic.
I am not a thinker. I am a man who writes.
The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only one page.
Contemporaries of Jorge Luis Borges
Other Literatures born within 50 years of Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986).