Quotes by Jorge Borges

• In general, every country has the language it deserves.
• To die for a religion is easier than to live it absolutely.
• Any life is made up of a single moment, the moment in which a man finds out, once and for all, who he is.
• I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.
• To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god.
• 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.
• 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.
• There is a concept that is the corrupter and destroyer of all others. I speak not of Evil, whose limited empire is that of ethics; I speak of the infinite.
• 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.
• The original is unfaithful to the translation.
• The flattery of posterity is not worth much more than contemporary flattery, which is worth nothing.
• The Falklands thing was a fight between two bald men over a comb.
• The fact is that all writers create their precursors. Their work modifies our conception of the past, just as it is bound to modify the future.
• The central problem of novel-writing is causality.
• Reality is not always probable, or likely.
• Reading is an activity subsequent to writing: more resigned, more civil, more intellectual.
• 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.
• Writing is nothing more than a guided dream.
• Poetry remembers that it was an oral art before it was a written art.
• Democracy is an abuse of statistics.
• Art always opts for the individual, the concrete; art is not Platonic.
• I foresee that man will resign himself each day to new abominations, and soon that only bandits and soldiers will be left.
• I have known uncertainty: a state unknown to the Greeks.
• 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.
• Nothing is built on stone; all is built on sand, but we must build as if the sand were stone.
• Life itself is a quotation.
• Like all those possessing a library, Aurelian was aware that he was guilty of not knowing his in its entirety.
• 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.
• 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.
• My undertaking is not difficult, essentially. I should only have to be immortal to carry it out.
• Life and death have been lacking in my life.