Jorge Luis Borges Quotes - Page 6

A writer needs loneliness, and he gets his share of it. He needs love, and he gets shared and also unshared love. He needs friendship. In fact, he needs the universe. To be a writer is, in a sense, to be a day-dreamer - to be living a kind of double life.

We have shared out, like thieves, the amazing treasures of days and nights.

The mightiest love was granted him Love that does not expect to be loved.

You can't measure time by days, the way you measure money by dollars and cents, because dollars are all the same while every day is different and maybe every hour as well.

How can we manage to illuminate the pathos of our lives?

When I wake up, I wake to something worse. It’s the astonishment of being myself

I have known uncertainty: a state unknown to the Greeks.

What I'm really concerned about is reaching one person. And that person may be myself for all I know.

Happy are the beloved and the lovers and those who can live without love.

I foresee that man will resign himself each day to new abominations, and soon that only bandits and soldiers will be left...

Reality may avoid the obligation to be interesting, but ... hypotheses may not.

When you come right down to it, opinions are the most superficial things about anyone

There is a concept which corrupts and upsets all others. I refer not to Evil, whose limited realm is that of ethics; I refer to the infinite.

Fame is a form, perhaps the worst form, of incomprehension.

That is what always happens: we never know whether we are victors or whether we are defeated.

The things that are said in literature are always the same. What is important is the way they are said.

Every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.

Music, feelings of happiness, mythology, faces worn by time, certain twilights and certain places, want to tell us something, or they told us something that we should not have missed, or they are about to tell us something; this imminence of a revelation that is not produced is, perhaps, the esthetic event.

One concept corrupts and confuses the others. I am not speaking of the Evil whose limited sphere is ethics; I am speaking of the infinite.

Heaven and hell seem out of proportion to me: the actions of men do not deserve so much.

Every novel is an ideal plane inserted into the realm of reality.

I had always thought of Paradise / In form and image as a library.

You don't have to try to be contemporary. You are already contemporary. What one has in mythology is being evolved all the time. Personally, I think I can do with Greek and Old Norse mythology. For example, I don't think I stand in need of planes or of railways or of cars.

Writing long books is a laborious and impoverishing act of foolishness: expanding in five hundred pages an idea that could be perfectly explained in a few minutes. A better procedure is to pretend that those books already exist and to offer a summary, a commentary.

Besides, rereading, not reading, is what counts.