Jorge Luis Borges Quotes - Page 4

There is an hour of the afternoon when the plain is on the verge of saying something. It never says, or perhaps it says it infinitely, or perhaps we do not understand it, or we understand it and it is untranslatable as music.

The word happiness exists in every language; it is plausible the thing itself exists.

As a boy, I used to marvel that the letters in a closed book did not get scrambled and lost overnight.

The task of art is to transform what is continuously happening to us, to transform all of these things into symbols, into music, into something which can last in man’s memory. That is our duty. If we don’t fulfill it, we feel unhappy.

There are no moral or intellectual merits. Homer composed the Odyssey; if we postulate an infinite period of time, with infinite circumstances and changes, the impossible thing is not to compose the Odyssey, at least once.

Let others pride themselves about how many pages they have written; I'd rather boast about the ones I've read.

A writer, or any man, must believe that whatever happens to him is an instrument; everything has been given for an end. This is even stronger in the case of the artist. Everything that happens, including humiliations, embarrassments, misfortunes, all has been given like clay, like material for one's art. One must accept it.

Sometimes, looking at the many books I have at home, I feel I shall die before I come to the end of them, yet I cannot resist the temptation of buying new books. Whenever I walk into a bookstore and find a book on one of my hobbies — for example, Old English or Old Norse poetry — I say to myself, “What a pity I can’t buy that book, for I already have a copy at home.

When I write, I do it urged by an intimate necessity. I don't have in mind an exclusive public, or a public of multitudes, I don't think in either thing. I think about expressing what I want to say. I try to do it in the simplest way possible.

A labyrinth of symbols... An invisible labyrinth of time.

I am interested in the past. Perhaps one of the reasons is we cannot make, cannot change the past. I mean you can hardly unmake the present. But the past after all is merely to say a memory, a dream. You know my own past seems continually changed when I am remembering it, or reading things that are interesting to me.

It means much to have loved, to have been happy, to have laid my hand on the living Garden, even for a day.

A . . . poet is a discoverer rather than an inventor.

I think of reading a book as no less an experience than travelling or falling in love.

May Heaven exist, even if my place is Hell.

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.

The dictionary is based on the hypothesis -- obviously an unproven one -- that languages are made up of equivalent synonyms.

There is no intellectual exercise which is not ultimately useless.

I think most people are more important than their opinions.

We are our memory, we are that chimerical museum of shifting shapes, that pile of broken mirrors.

I live in a grey world, rather like the silver screen world. But yellow stands out.

Writing is nothing more than a guided dream.

You who read me, are You sure of understanding my language?

I have no way of knowing whether the events that I am about to narrate are effects or causes.

In our dreams (writes Coleridge) images represent the sensations we think they cause; we do not feel horror because we are threatened by a sphinx; we dream of a sphinx in order to explain the horror we feel.