Jorge Luis Borges Quotes - Page 3

The Falklands thing was a fight between two bald men over a comb.

Two aesthetics exist: the passive aesthetic of mirrors and the active aesthetic of prisms. Guided by the former, art turns into a copy of the environment's objectivity or the individual's psychic history. Guided by the latter, art is redeemed, makes the world into its instrument, and forges, beyond spatial and temporal prisons, a personal vision.

Time can't be measured in days the way money is measured in pesos and centavos, because all pesos are equal, while every day, perhaps every hour, is different.

There is nothing in the world that is not mysterious, but the mystery is more evident in certain things than in others: in the sea, in the eyes of the elders, in the color yellow, and in music.

For me, beauty is a physical sensation, something we feel with our whole body. It is not the result of judgement. We do not arrive at it by way of rules. We either feel beauty or we don't.

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.

I have used the philosophers' ideas for my own private literary purposes, but I don't think that I'm a thinker. I suppose that my thinking has been done for me by Berkeley, by Hume, by Schopenhauer, by Mauthner perhaps.

I write for myself, and perhaps for half a dozen friends. And that should be enough. And that might improve the quality of my writing. But if I were writing for thousands of people, then I would write what might please them. And as I know nothing about them, and maybe I'd have a rather low opinion of them, I don't think that would do any good to my work.

I am not sure of anything, I know nothing . . . can you imagine that I don't even know the date of my own death?

Art is endless like a river flowing, passing, yet remaining.

Each thing implies the universe.

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.

I believe books will never disappear. It is impossible for it to happen. Of all man's diverse tools, undoubtedly the most astounding are his books... If books were to disappear, history would disappear. So would man.

La duda es uno de los nombres de la inteligencia.

You have wakened not out of sleep, but into a prior dream, and that dream lies within another, and so on, to infinity, which is the number of grains of sand. The path that you are to take is endless, and you will die before you have truly awakened.

The future is as irrevocable as an inflexible yesterday.

The art of writing is mysterious, the opinions we hold are ephemeral.

Loneliness does not worry me; life is difficult enough, putting up with yourself and with your own habits.

To die for a religion is easier than to live it absolutely.

Any time something is written against me, I not only share the sentiment but feel I could do the job far better myself. Perhaps I should advise would-be enemies to send me their grievances beforehand, with full assurance that they will receive my every aid and support. I have even secretly longed to write, under a pen name, a merciless tirade against myself.

To be immortal is commonplace; except for man, all creatures are immortal, for they are ignorant of death; what is divine, terrible, incomprehensible, is to know that one is immortal.

I cannot walk through the suburbs in the solitude of the night without thinking that the night pleases us because it suppresses idle details, just as our memory does.

Time is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire.

I never reread what I've written. I'm far too afraid to feel ashamed of what I've done.

There's no need to build a labyrinth when the entire universe is one.