26 Jorge Luis Borges Quotes on Life

Jorge Luis Borges quotes on life

10. Que el cielo exista, aunque mi lugar sea el infierno.

16. 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.

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

37. A writer - and, I believe, generally all persons - must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. 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.

38. Life itself is a quotation.

40. Life and death have been lacking in my life.

41. Imprecision is tolerable and verisimilar in literature, because we always tend towards it in life.

54. In life, he suffered from a sense of unreality, as do many Englishmen.

64. My undertaking is not difficult, essentially... I should only have to be immortal to carry it out.

68. I reflected that everything happens to a man precisely, precisely now. Centuries of centuries and only in the present do things happen; countless men in the air, on the face of the earth and the sea, and all that really is happening is happening to me . . .

78. The Garden of Forking Paths is an incomplete, but not false, image of the universe as Ts'ui Pen conceived it. In contrast to Newton and Schopenhauer, your ancestor did not believe in a uniform, absolute time. He believed in an infinite series of times, in a growing, dizzying net of divergent, convergent and parallel times. This network of times which approached one another, forked, broke off, or were unaware of one another for centuries, embraces all possibilities of time. We do not exist in the majority of these times; in some you exist, and not I; in others I, and not you; in others, both of us.

80. 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.

90. On the floor, and hanging on to the bar, squatted an old man, immobile as an object. His years had reduced and polished him as water does a stone or the generations of men do a sentence. He was dark, dried up , diminutive, and seemed outside time, situated in eternity.

92. And yet, and yet : Negar la sucesion temporal, negar el yo, negar el universo astronomico, son desesperaciones aparentes y consuelos secretos. Nuestro destino no es espantoso por irreal: es espantoso porque es irreversible y de hierro. El tiempo es la sustancia de que estoy hecho. El tiempo es un rio que me arrebata, pero yo soy el rio; es un tigre que me destroza, pero yo soy el tigre; es un fuego que me consume, pero yo soy el fuego. El mundo desgraciadamente es real; yo, desgraciadamente, soy Borges.

94. Music, states of happiness, mythology, faces belabored by time, certain twilights and certain places try to tell us something, or have said something we should not have missed, or are about to say something; this imminence of a revelation which does not occur is, perhaps, the aesthetic phenomenon.

116. 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.

126. He cometido el peor pecado que uno puede cometer. No he sido feliz.

127. He sospechado alguna vez que la unica cosa sin misterio es la felicidad, porque se justifica por si sola.

131. Solo aquello que se ha ido es lo que nos pertenece.

134. 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.

     Attribution disputed; shown as originally published.

136. Death (or its allusion) makes men precious and pathetic. They are moving because of their phantom condition; every act they execute may be their last; there is not a face that is not on the verge of dissolving like a face in a dream.

138. I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities that I have visited, all my ancestors . . . Perhaps I would have liked to be my father, who wrote and had the decency of not publishing. Nothing, nothing, my friend; what I have told you: I am not sure of anything, I know nothing. . . Can you imagine that I not even know the date of my death?

141. Nothing is built on stone; all is built on sand, but we must build as if the sand were stone.

143. 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.

145. 'The earth we inhabit is an error, an incompetent parody. Mirrors and paternity are abominable because they multiply and affirm it.' - (dogma of a fictional religion in 'Hakim, the masked dyer of Merv'. Part of this quote is also attributed to a heresiarch of Uqbar in 'Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius'.)

146. 'The central fact of my life has been the existence of words and the possibility of weaving those words into poetry.'