Jorge Luis Borges Quotes - Page 2

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

Any life, however long and complicated it may be, actually consists of a single moment — the moment when a man knows forever more who he is.

I have committed the worst of sins one can commit... I have not been happy.

We accept reality so readily - perhaps because we sense that nothing is real.

I saw all the mirrors on earth and none of them reflected me.

Time forks perpetually toward innumerable futures.

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

Everything touches everything.

When writers die they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarnation.

Democracy is an abuse of statistics.

Death is just infinity closing in.

Poets, like the blind, can see in the dark.

I have preferred to teach my students not English literature but my love for certain authors, or, even better, certain pages, or even better than that, certain lines. One falls in love with a line, then with a page, then with an author. Well, why not? It is a beautiful process.

The fact is that poetry is not the books in the library . . . Poetry is the encounter of the reader with the book, the discovery of the book.

Soccer is popular because stupidity is popular.

Israelites, Christians and Muslims profess immortality, but the veneration they render this world proves they believe only in it, since they destine all other worlds, in infinite number, to be its reward or punishment.

The man who has learned that three plus one are four doesn't have to go through a proof of that assertion with coins, or dice, or chess pieces, or pencils. He knows it, and that's that. He cannot conceive a different sum. There are mathematicians who say that three plus one is a tautology for four, a different way of saying "four" ... If three plus one can be two, or fourteen, then reason is madness.

Beyond my anxiety, beyond this writing, the universe waits, inexhaustible, inviting.

I cannot sleep unless I am surrounded by books.

Chang Tzu tells us of a persevering man who after three laborious years mastered the art of dragon-slaying. For the rest of his days, he had not a single opportunity to test his skills.

He was very religious; he believed that he had a secret pact with God which exempted him from doing good in exchange for prayers and piety.

The future is inevitable and precise, but it may not occur. God lurks in the gaps.

From my weakness, I drew strength that never left me.

If space is infinite, we may be at any point in space. If time is infinite, we may be at any point in time.

Censorship is the mother of metaphor.