Life and death have been lacking in my life.
Borges, Jorge Luis. Discussion. 1932.
Imprecision is tolerable and verisimilar in literature, because we always tend towards it in life.
Borges, Jorge Luis. Discussion. 1932.
Art always opts for the individual, the concrete; art is not Platonic.
Borges, Jorge Luis. Discussion. 1932.
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.
Borges, Jorge Luis. Discussion. 1932.
He transforms all concepts into incommunicable, solidified objects. To refute him is to become contaminated with unreality.
Borges, Jorge Luis. Discussion. 1932.
It is venturesome to think that a coordination of words (philosophies are nothing more than that) can resemble the universe very much.
Borges, Jorge Luis. Discussion. 1932.
The possibilities of the art of combination are not infinite, but they tend to be frightful.
Borges, Jorge Luis. Discussion. 1932.
The central problem of novel-writing is causality.
Borges, Jorge Luis. Discussion. 1932.
I owe the discovery of Uqbar to the conjunction of a mirror and an encyclopedia.
Borges, Jorge Luis. Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius. 1940.
For one of those gnostics, the visible universe was an illusion or, more precisely, a sophism. Mirrors and fatherhood are abominable because they multiply it and extend it.
Borges, Jorge Luis. Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius. 1940.
In life, he suffered from a sense of unreality, as do many Englishmen.
Borges, Jorge Luis. Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius. 1940.
Who are the inventors of Tlön? The plural is inevitable, because the hypothesis of a lone inventor — an infinite Leibniz laboring away darkly and modestly — has been unanimously discounted. It is conjectured that this brave new world is the work of a secret society of astronomers, biologists, engineers, metaphysicians, poets, chemists, algebraists, moralists, painters, geometers... directed by an obscure man of genius. Individuals mastering these diverse disciplines are abundant, but not so those capable of inventiveness and less so those capable of subordinating that inventiveness to a rigorous and systematic plan.
Borges, Jorge Luis. Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius. 1940.
Hume noted for all time that Berkeley's arguments did not admit the slightest refutation nor did they cause the slightest conviction. This dictum is entirely correct in its application to the earth, but entirely false in Tlön. The nations of this planet are congenitally idealist. Their language and the derivations of their language — religion, letters, metaphysics — all presuppose idealism. The world for them is not a concourse of objects in space; it is a heterogeneous series of independent acts. It is successive and temporal, not spatial.
Borges, Jorge Luis. Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius. 1940.
One thinker no less brilliant than the heresiarch himself, but in the orthodox tradition, advanced a most daring hypothesis. 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.
Borges, Jorge Luis. Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius. 1940.
The geometry of Tlön comprises two somewhat different disciplines: the visual and the tactile. The latter corresponds to our own geometry and is subordinated to the first.
Borges, Jorge Luis. Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius. 1940.
It is no exaggeration to state that the classic culture of Tlön comprises only one discipline: psychology. All others are subordinated to it. I have said that the men of this planet conceive the universe as a series of mental processes which do not develop in space but successively in time.
Borges, Jorge Luis. Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius. 1940.
One of the schools of Tlön goes so far as to negate time; it reasons that the present is indefinite, that the future has no reality other than as a present hope, that the past has no reality other than as a present memory.
Borges, Jorge Luis. Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius. 1940.
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.
Borges, Jorge Luis. The Garden of Forking Paths. 1942.
My undertaking is not difficult, essentially... I should only have to be immortal to carry it out.
Borges, Jorge Luis. The Garden of Forking Paths. 1942.
Every man should be capable of all ideas and I understand that in the future this will be the case.
Borges, Jorge Luis. The Garden of Forking Paths. 1942.
I have known that thing the Greeks knew not – uncertainty.
Borges, Jorge Luis. The Garden of Forking Paths. 1942.
It seemed incredible that this day, a day without warnings or omens, might be that of my implacable death.
Borges, Jorge Luis. The Garden of Forking Paths. 1942.
I leave to the various futures (not to all) my garden of forking paths.
Borges, Jorge Luis. The Garden of Forking Paths. 1942.
Time forks perpetually toward innumerable futures. In one of them I am your enemy.
Borges, Jorge Luis. The Garden of Forking Paths. 1942.
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.
Borges, Jorge Luis. Ficciones. 1944.
Like every writer, he measured the virtues of other writers by their performance, and asked that they measure him by what he conjectured or planned.
Borges, Jorge Luis. Ficciones. 1944.
What one man does is something done, in some measure, by all men.
Borges, Jorge Luis. Ficciones. 1944.
That history should have imitated history was already sufficiently marvellous; that history should imitate literature is inconceivable....
Borges, Jorge Luis. Ficciones. 1944.
May Heaven exist, even if my place is Hell.
Borges, Jorge Luis. The Library of Babel. 1941.
QuoteTime 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.
Borges, Jorge Luis. Brodie’s Report. 1970.
