110+ Jorge Luis Borges Quotes On Death, Imaginative And Surreal

Jorge Luis Borges was an Argentinian poet, essayist, and author. He wrote works of fiction and non-fiction that were influential in the development of magical realism and postmodern literature. His most famous works include Ficciones, The Aleph, and Labyrinths. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Jorge Luis Borges on life, death, imaginative.

Top 10 Jorge Luis Borges Quotes

1. So plant your own gardens and decorate your own soul, instead of waiting for someone to bring you flowers.
2. Being with you and not being with you is the only way I have to measure time.
3. I cannot sleep unless I am surrounded by books.
4. 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.
5. The worst labyrinth is not that intricate form that can entrap us forever, but a single and precise straight line
6. Nothing is built on stone; all is built on sand, but we must build as if the sand were stone.
7. 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.
8. The original is unfaithful to the translation.
9. Dictatorships foster oppression, dictatorships foster servitude, dictatorships foster cruelty; more abominable is the fact that they foster idiocy.
10. Truth never penetrates an unwilling mind.

Jorge Luis Borges Image Quotes

The original is unfaithful to the translation. — Jorge Luis Borges

Jorge Luis Borges Short Quotes

• The future is inevitable and precise, but it may not occur. God lurks in the gaps.
• I gazed at every mirror on the planet, not one gave back my reflection.
• I owe the discovery of Uqbar to the conjunction of a mirror and an encyclopedia.
• Reality is not always probable, or likely.
• Reality is partial to symmetry and slight anachronisms
• Don't talk unless you can improve the silence.
• The minotaur more than justifies the existence of the labyrinth.
• To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god.
• A book is not an isolated being: it is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships
• There's no need to build a labyrinth when the entire universe is one.

Jorge Luis Borges Quotes About Life

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

In my next life I will try to commit more errors. — Jorge Luis Borges

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. — Jorge Luis Borges

Life itself is a quotation. — Jorge Luis Borges

Any life, no matter how long and complex it may be, is made up of a single moment - the moment in which a man finds out, once and for all, who he is. — Jorge Luis Borges

The central fact of my life has been the existence of words and the possibility of weaving those words into poetry. — Jorge Luis Borges

Thus my life is a flight and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to him. — Jorge Luis Borges

Imprecision is tolerable and verisimilar in literature, because we always tend towards it in life. — Jorge Luis Borges

In the course of a life devoted less to living than to reading, I have verified many times that literary intentions and theories are nothing more than stimuli and that the final work usually ignores or even contradicts them. — Jorge Luis Borges

Blindness has not been for me a total misfortune; it should not be seen in a pathetic way. It should be seen as a way of life: one of the styles of living. — Jorge Luis Borges

Jorge Luis Borges Quotes About Death

It seemed incredible to me that day without premonitions or symbols should be the one of my inexorable death . — Jorge Luis Borges

Best thing to happen for a poet. A fine death, no? An impressive death. — Jorge Luis Borges

Death is just infinity closing in. — Jorge Luis Borges

I am almost sure to be blotted out by death, but sometimes I think it is not impossible that I may continue to live in some other manner after my physical death . Or, as Hamlet wonders, what dreams will come when we leave this body? — Jorge Luis Borges

You may win your heart's desire, but in the end you're cheated of it by death. — Jorge Luis Borges

The steps a man takes from the day of his birth until that of his death trace in time an inconcievable figure. The Divine Mind intuitively grasps that form immediately, as men do a triangle. — Jorge Luis Borges

It seemed incredible that this day, a day without warnings or omens, might be that of my implacable death. — Jorge Luis Borges

Through the years, a man peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, tools, stars, horses and people. Shortly before his death, he discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines traces the image of his own face. — Jorge Luis Borges

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

Jorge Luis Borges Quotes About Imaginative

I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library. — Jorge Luis Borges

Reality is not always probable, or likely. But if you're writing a story, you have to make it as plausible as you can, because if not, the reader's imagination will reject it. — Jorge Luis Borges

Yo, que me figuraba el Paraíso / Bajo la especie de una biblioteca. I have always imagined Paradise as a kind of library. — Jorge Luis Borges

Jorge Luis Borges Quotes About Philosophical

There is no exercise of the intellect which is not, in the final analysis, useless. A philosophical doctrine begins as a plausible description of the universe; with the passage of the years it becomes a mere chapter if not a paragraph or a name in the history of philosophy. — Jorge Luis Borges

No one is anyone, one single immortal man is all men. Like Cornelius Agrippa, I am god, I am hero, I am philosopher, I am demon and I am world, which is a tedious way of saying that I do not exist. — Jorge Luis Borges

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. — Jorge Luis Borges

Many people have thought of me as a thinker, as a philosopher, or even as a mystic. Well the truth is that though I have found reality perplexing enough - in fact, I find it gets more perplexing all the time - I never think of myself as a thinker. — Jorge Luis Borges

Jorge Luis Borges Quotes About Single

Whatever one man does, it is as if all men did it. For that reason, it is not unfair that one disobedience in a garden should contaminate all humanity; for that reason it is not unjust that the crucifixion of a single Jew should be sufficient to save it. — Jorge Luis Borges

Any life is made up of a single moment, the moment in which a man finds out, once and for all, who he is. — Jorge Luis Borges

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. — Jorge Luis Borges

In truth, the Library includes all verbal structures, all variations permitted by the twenty-five orthographical symbols, but not a single example of absolute nonsense. — Jorge Luis Borges

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. — Jorge Luis Borges

Literature is not exhaustible, for the sufficient and simple reason that a single book is not. — Jorge Luis Borges

Jorge Luis Borges Quotes About Writing

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. — Jorge Luis Borges

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. — Jorge Luis Borges

Reading is an activity subsequent to writing: more resigned, more civil, more intellectual. — Jorge Luis Borges

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

Personally, I am a hedonistic reader; I have never read a book merely because it was ancient. I read books for the aesthetic emotions they offer me, and I ignore the commentaries and criticism. — Jorge Luis Borges

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

Like all writers, he measured the achievements of others by what they had accomplished, asking of them that they measure him by what he envisaged or planned. — Jorge Luis Borges

I do not write for a select minority, which means nothing to me, nor for that adulated platonic entity known as ‘The Masses’. Both abstractions, so dear to the demagogue, I disbelieve in. I write for myself and for my friends, and I write to ease the passing of time. — Jorge Luis Borges

Although I'm very lazy when it comes to writing, I'm not that lazy when it comes to thinking. I like to develop the plan of a short story, then cut it as short as possible, try to evolve all the necessary details. I know far more about the characters than what actually comes out of the writing. — Jorge Luis Borges

The art of writing is mysterious, the opinions we hold are ephemeral. — Jorge Luis Borges

Jorge Luis Borges Quotes About Writer

Im merely a dreamer, and then a writer, and my happiest moments are when I'm a reader. — Jorge Luis Borges

My friends tell me that I am an intruder, that I don't really write when I attempt poetry. But those of my friends who write in prose say that I'm no writer when I attempt prose. So really I don't know what to do, I'm in a quandary. — Jorge Luis Borges

I don't think esthetic schools are important. What is important is the use that is made of them, or whatever the individual writer does. — Jorge Luis Borges

I'm not interested in the fact that a writer may label himself as being intellectual or anti-intellectual. l'm really interested in the stuff he's turning out. — Jorge Luis Borges

I think it's all to the good that a writer shouldn't be too famous. Because, in a country where a writer may be famous, he may be pandering to the mob, celebrity and so on. — Jorge Luis Borges

If a writer disbelieves what he is writing, then he can hardly expect his reader to believe it. — Jorge Luis Borges

A writer's work is the product of laziness. — Jorge Luis Borges

God must not engage in theology. The writer must not destroy by human reasonings the faith that art requires of us. — Jorge Luis Borges

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

What a writer wants to do is not what he does. — Jorge Luis Borges

Jorge Luis Borges Famous Quotes And Sayings

The original is unfaithful to the translation. — Jorge Luis Borges

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. — Jorge Luis Borges

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. — Jorge Luis Borges

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. — Jorge Luis Borges

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. — Jorge Luis Borges

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

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. — Jorge Luis Borges

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. — Jorge Luis Borges

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. — Jorge Luis Borges

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. — Jorge Luis Borges

It is clear that there is no classification of the Universe that is not arbitrary and full of conjectures. The reason for this is very simple: we do not know what kind of thing the universe is. — Jorge Luis Borges

I would define the baroque as that style that deliberately exhausts (or tries to exhaust) its own possibilities, and that borders on self-caricature. The baroque is the final stage in all art, when art flaunts and squanders its resources. — Jorge Luis Borges

A system is nothing more than the subordination of all aspects of the universe to any one of such aspects. — Jorge Luis Borges

Your unforgivable sins do not allow you to see my splendor. — Jorge Luis Borges

Man's memory shapes Its own Eden within — Jorge Luis Borges

We forget that we are all dead men conversing with dead men. — Jorge Luis Borges

Democracy is an abuse of statistics. — Jorge Luis Borges

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. — Jorge Luis Borges

Captivated by its discipline, humanity forgets and goes on forgetting that it is the discipline of chess players, not of angels. — Jorge Luis Borges

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. — Jorge Luis Borges

We (the indivisible divinity that works in us) have dreamed the world. We have dreamed it resistant, mysterious, visible, ubiquitous in space and firm in time, but we have allowed slight, and eternal, bits of the irrational to form part of its architecture so as to know that it is false. — Jorge Luis Borges

Time is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire. — Jorge Luis Borges

It also occurred to him that throughout history, humankind has told two stories: the story of a lost ship sailing the Mediterranean seas in quest of a beloved isle, and the story of a god who allows himself to be crucified on Golgotha. — Jorge Luis Borges

I, who have been so many men in vain, want to be one man, myself alone. From out of a whirlwind the voice of God replied: I am not, either. I dreamed the world the way you dreamed your work, my Shakespeare: one of the forms of my dream was you, who, like me, are many and one. — Jorge Luis Borges

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

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. — Jorge Luis Borges

Fame is a form, perhaps the worst form, of incomprehension. — Jorge Luis Borges

The flattery of posterity is not worth much more than contemporary flattery, which is worth nothing. — Jorge Luis Borges

Translations are a partial and precious documentation of the changes the text suffers. — Jorge Luis Borges

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. — Jorge Luis Borges

In the order of literature, as in others, there is no act that is not the coronation of an infinite series of causes and the source of an infinite series of effects. — Jorge Luis Borges

My father and he had cemented one of those English friendships which begin by avoiding intimacies and eventually eliminate speech altogether. — Jorge Luis Borges

We have a very precise image - an image at times shameless - of what we have lost, but we are ignorant of what may follow or replace it. — Jorge Luis Borges

The earth we inhabit is an error, an incompetent parody. Mirrors and paternity are abominable because they multiply and affirm it. — Jorge Luis Borges

Happy are the beloved and the lovers and those who can live without love. — Jorge Luis Borges

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

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

Reality favors symmetry. — Jorge Luis Borges

I have sometimes suspected that the only thing that holds no mystery is happiness, because it is its own justification. — Jorge Luis Borges

What will die with me when I die, what pathetic or fragile form will the world lose? — Jorge Luis Borges

This felicitous supposition declared that there is only one Individual, and that this indivisible Individual is every one of the separate beings in the universe, and that these beings are the instruments and masks of divinity itself. — Jorge Luis Borges

To say good-bye is to deny separation; it is to say Today we play at going our own ways, but we'll see each other tomorrow. Men invented farewells because they somehow knew themselves to be immortal, even while seeing themselves as contingent and ephemeral. — Jorge Luis Borges

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. — Jorge Luis Borges

It may be that universal history is the history of the different intonations given a handful of metaphors. — Jorge Luis Borges

Censorship is the mother of metaphor. — Jorge Luis Borges

My books standing there on the shelf do not know that I have written them. — Jorge Luis Borges

What will die with me the day I die? What pathetic or frail image will be lost to the world? The voice of Macedonio Fernandez, the image of a bay horse in a vacant lot on the corner of Sarrano and Charcas, a bar of sulfur in the drawer of a mahogany desk? — Jorge Luis Borges

I know of one semibarbarous zone whose librarians repudiate the "vain and superstitious habit" of trying to find sense in books, equating such a quest with attempting to find meaning in dreams or in the chaotic lines on the palms of one's hand. — Jorge Luis Borges

One literature differs from another, either before or after it, not so much because of the text as for the manner in which it is read. — Jorge Luis Borges

How can we manage to illuminate the pathos of our lives? — Jorge Luis Borges

Leaving behind the babble of the plaza, I enter the Library. I feel, almost physically, the gravitation of the books, the enveloping serenity of order, time magically dessicated and preserved. — Jorge Luis Borges

Literature is not exhaustible, for the sufficient and simple reason that a single book is not. A book is not an isolated entity: it is a narration, an axis of innumerable narrations. One literature differs from another, either before or after it, not so much because of the text as for the manner in which it is read. — Jorge Luis Borges

He constructed a vast labyrinthine of periods, made impassable by the piling-up of clauses upon clauses-clauses in which oversight and bad grammar seemed manifestations of disdain. — Jorge Luis Borges

In the critics' vocabulary, the work 'precursor' is indispensable, but it should be cleansed of all connotations of polemics or rivalry. — Jorge Luis Borges

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

The word happiness exists in every language; it is plausible the thing itself exists. — Jorge Luis Borges

Whoever would undertake some atrocious enterprise should act as if it were already accomplished should impose upon himself a future as irrevocable as the past. — Jorge Luis Borges

In fact I'm in too much of a mental muddle to know where I am - an idealist or not. I'm a mere man of letters, and I do what I can with those subjects. — Jorge Luis Borges

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. — Jorge Luis Borges

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. — Jorge Luis Borges

The truth is that we live out our lives putting off all that can be put off; perhaps we all know deep down that we are immortal and that sooner or later all men will do and know all things. — Jorge Luis Borges

The sea is an idiom I cannot decipher. — Jorge Luis Borges

I confess that I have not cleared a path through all seven hundred pages, I confess to having examined only bits and pieces, and yet I know what it is, with that bold and legitimate certainty with which we assert our knowledge of a city, without ever having been rewarded with the intimacy of all the many streets it includes. — Jorge Luis Borges

Then I reflect that all things happen, happen to one, precisely now. Century follows century, and things happen only in the present. There are countless men in the air, on land and at sea, and all that really happens happens to me. — Jorge Luis Borges

A man sets himself the task of portraying the world. Shortly before he dies he discovers that this patient labyrinth of lines is a drawing of his own face. — Jorge Luis Borges

A book is more than a verbal structure or series of verbal structures; it is the dialogue it establishes with its reader and the intonation it imposes upon his voice and the changing and durable images it leaves in his memory. A book is not an isolated being: it is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships. — Jorge Luis Borges

I don't think I can really believe in doomsday; I could hardly believe in rewards and punishments, in heaven or hell. As I wrote down in one of my sonnets - I seem to be always plagiarizing, imitating myself or somebody else for that matter - I think I am quite unworthy of heaven or of hell, and even of immortality. — Jorge Luis Borges

It's a shame that we have to choose between two such second-rate countries as the USSR and the USA. — Jorge Luis Borges

In adultery, there is usually tenderness and self-sacrifice; in murder, courage; in profanation and blasphemy, a certain satanic splendour. Judas elected those offences unvisited by any virtues: abuse of confidence and informing. — Jorge Luis Borges

I thought of a labyrinth of labyrinths, of one sinuous spreading labyrinth that would encompass the past and the future . . . I felt myself to be, for an unknown period of time, an abstract perceiver of the world. — Jorge Luis Borges

Why do you seem so annoyed at what I'm saying?" "Because we're too much like each other. I loathe your face, which is a caricature of mine, I loathe your voice, which is a mockery of mine, I loathe your pathetic syntax, which is my own. — Jorge Luis Borges

People think that I've committed myself to idealism, to solipsism, or to doctrines of the cabala, because I've used them in my tales. But really I was only trying to see what could be done with them. On the other hand, it might be argued that if I use them it's because I was feeling an affinity to them. Of course, that's true. — Jorge Luis Borges

Life Lessons by Jorge Luis Borges

1. Life is fleeting, so make the most of it by living with passion and curiosity. Borges' work often speaks to the idea of living a life of exploration and embracing the unknown.
2. Embrace the power of imagination and creativity. Borges' works often explore the power of the imagination and how it can be used to create new worlds and ideas.
3. Appreciate the beauty of language and literature. Borges' works are often praised for their intricate use of language, and his appreciation of literature and its power to transport readers to new realms.