Jorge Luis Borges Quotes

Don't talk unless you can improve the silence.

So plant your own gardens and decorate your own soul, instead of waiting for someone to bring you flowers.

Being with you and not being with you is the only way I have to measure time.

I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities I have visited.

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.

Truth never penetrates an unwilling mind.

It only takes two facing mirrors to build a labyrinth.

While we are asleep in this world, we are awake in another one

What you really value is what you miss, not what you have.

Doubt is one of the names of intelligence.

I can give you my loneliness, my darkness, the hunger of my heart, I am trying to bribe you with uncertainty, with danger, with defeat.

Of all man’s instruments, the most wondrous, no doubt, is the book. The other instruments are extensions of his body. The microscope, the telescope, are extensions of his sight; the telephone is the extension of his voice; then we have the plow and the sword, extensions of the arm. But the book is something else altogether: the book is an extension of memory and imagination.

The worst labyrinth is not that intricate form that can entrap us forever, but a single and precise straight line

In my next life I will try to commit more errors.

Only in the present do things happen.

Life itself is a quotation.

I think that the reader should enrich what he is reading. He should misunderstand the text; he should change it into something else.

Creativity is suspended between memory and forgetting.

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.

Dictatorships foster oppression, dictatorships foster servitude, dictatorships foster cruelty; more abominable is the fact that they foster idiocy.

The original is unfaithful to the translation.

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

Being an agnostic means all things are possible, even God, even the Holy Trinity. This world is so strange that anything may happen, or may not happen. Being an agnostic makes me live in a larger, a more fantastic kind of world, almost uncanny. It makes me more tolerant.

The mind was dreaming. The world was its dream.

The future has no other reality than as present hope, and the past is no more than present memory.