"I have always imagined that Paradise will be some kind of library."
— 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

"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

"I cannot sleep unless I am surrounded by books."
— Jorge Luis Borges

"I have always imagined paradise as a kind of library."
— 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

"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 (Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings)

"To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god."
— Jorge Luis Borges

"Life itself is a quotation."
— Jorge Luis Borges

"Siempre imaginé que el Paraíso sería algún tipo de biblioteca."
— Jorge Luis Borges

"Reality is not always probable, or likely."
— 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 (The Aleph and Other Stories)

"The mind was dreaming. The world was its dream."
— Jorge Luis Borges

"I thought that a man can be an enemy of other men, of the moments of other men, but not of a country: not of fireflies, words, gardens, streams of water, sunsets."
— 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

"Writing is nothing more than a guided dream."
— Jorge Luis Borges

"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."
— Jorge Luis Borges

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

"In the critic's vocabulary, the word "precursor" is indispensable, but it should be cleansed of all connotations of polemic or rivalry. The fact is that every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future."
-- Essay: "Kafka and his Precursors"
— Jorge Luis Borges

"Like all those possessing a library, Aurelian was aware that he was guilty of not knowing his in its entirety."
— Jorge Luis Borges

"The certainty that everything has already been written annuls us, or renders us phantasmal."
— Jorge Luis Borges

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

"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 aesthetic event'."
— Jorge Luis Borges

"On the back part of the step, toward the right, I saw a small iridescent sphere of almost unbearable brilliance. At first I thought it was revolving; then I realised that this movement was an illusion created by the dizzying world it bounded. The Aleph's diameter was probably little more than an inch, but all space was there, actual and undiminished. Each thing (a mirror's face, let us say) was infinite things, since I distinctly saw it from every angle of the universe. I saw the teeming sea; I saw daybreak and nightfall; I saw the multitudes of America; I saw a silvery cobweb in the center of a black pyramid; I saw a splintered labyrinth (it was London); I saw, close up, unending eyes watching themselves in me as in a mirror; I saw all the mirrors on earth and none of them reflected me; I saw in a backyard of Soler Street the same tiles that thirty years before I'd seen in the entrance of a house in Fray Bentos; I saw bunches of grapes, snow, tobacco, lodes of metal, steam; I saw convex equatorial deserts and each one of their grains of sand; I saw a woman in Inverness whom I shall never forget; I saw her tangled hair, her tall figure, I saw the cancer in her breast; I saw a ring of baked mud in a sidewalk, where before there had been a tree; I saw a summer house in Adrogué and a copy of the first English translation of Pliny -- Philemon Holland's -- and all at the same time saw each letter on each page (as a boy, I used to marvel that the letters in a closed book did not get scrambled and lost overnight); I saw a sunset in Querétaro that seemed to reflect the colour of a rose in Bengal; I saw my empty bedroom; I saw in a closet in Alkmaar a terrestrial globe between two mirrors that multiplied it endlessly; I saw horses with flowing manes on a shore of the Caspian Sea at dawn; I saw the delicate bone structure of a hand; I saw the survivors of a battle sending out picture postcards; I saw in a showcase in Mirzapur a pack of Spanish playing cards; I saw the slanting shadows of ferns on a greenhouse floor; I saw tigers, pistons, bison, tides, and armies; I saw all the ants on the planet; I saw a Persian astrolabe; I saw in the drawer of a writing table (and the handwriting made me tremble) unbelievable, obscene, detailed letters, which Beatriz had written to Carlos Argentino; I saw a monument I worshipped in the Chacarita cemetery; I saw the rotted dust and bones that had once deliciously been Beatriz Viterbo; I saw the circulation of my own dark blood; I saw the coupling of love and the modification of death; I saw the Aleph from every point and angle, and in the Aleph I saw the earth and in the earth the Aleph and in the Aleph the earth; I saw my own face and my own bowels; I saw your face; and I felt dizzy and wept, for my eyes had seen that secret and conjectured object whose name is common to all men but which no man has looked upon -- the unimaginable universe.

I felt infinite wonder, infinite pity."
— Jorge Luis Borges

"I arrive now at the ineffable core of my story. And here begins my despair as a writer. All language is a set of symbols whose use among its speakers assumes a shared past. How, then, can I translate into words the limitless Aleph, which my floundering mind can scarcely encompass? Mystics, faced with the same problem, fall back on symbols: to signify the godhead, one Persian speaks of a bird that somehow is all birds; Alanus de Insulis, of a sphere whose center is everywhere and circumference is nowhere; Ezekiel, of a four-faced angel who at one and the same time moves east and west, north and south. (Not in vain do I recall these inconceivable analogies; they bear some relation to the Aleph.) Perhaps the gods might grant me a similar metaphor, but then this account would become contaminated by literature, by fiction. Really, what I want to do is impossible, for any listing of an endless series is doomed to be infinitesimal. In that single gigantic instant I saw millions of acts both delightful and awful; not one of them occupied the same point in space, without overlapping or transparency. What my eyes beheld was simultaneous, but what I shall now write down will be successive, because language is successive. Nonetheless, I'll try to recollect what I can."
— Jorge Luis Borges

"I have no way of knowing whether the events that I am about to narrate are effects or causes."
— Jorge Luis Borges (Collected Fictions)

"Besides, rereading, not reading, is what counts."
— Jorge Luis Borges

"Let neither tear nor reproach besmirch
this declaration of the mastery
of God who, with magnificent irony,
granted me both the gift of books and the night."
— Jorge Luis Borges

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

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

"Entonces Bioy Casares recordó que uno de los heresiarcas de Uqbar había declarado que los espejos y la cópula son abominables, porque multiplican el número de los hombres."
— Jorge Luis Borges

"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."
— Jorge Luis Borges

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

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

""Truly fine poetry must be read aloud. A good poem does not allow itself to be read in a low voice or silently. If we can read it silently, it is not a valid poem: a poem demands pronunciation. Poetry always remembers that it was an oral art before it was a written art. It remembers that it was first song.""
— Jorge Luis Borges

"Quienes dicen que el arte no debe propagar doctrinas suelen referirse a doctrinas contrarias a las suyas."
— Jorge Luis Borges

"... he thought that the rose was to be found in its own eternity and not in his words; and that we may mention or allude to a thing, but not express it."
— Jorge Luis Borges (Dreamtigers)

"To die for a religion is easier than to live it absolutely."
— Jorge Luis Borges

"Dicen que soy un gran escritor. Agradezco esa curiosa opinión, pero no la comparto. El día de mañana, algunos lúcidos la refutarán fácilmente y me tildarán de impostor o chapucero o de ambas cosas a la vez."
— Jorge Luis Borges

"Que otros se jacten de las páginas que han escrito; a mí me enorgullecen las que he leído."
— Jorge Luis Borges

"He consorted with prostitutes and poets...and with persons even worse."
— Jorge Luis Borges (Collected Fictions)

"Yo no hablo de venganzas ni perdones, el olvido es la única venganza y el único perdón."
— Jorge Luis Borges

"The great American writer Herman Melville says somewhere in The White Whale that a man ought to be 'a patriot to heaven,' and I believe it is a good thing, this ambition to be a cosmopolitan, this idea to be citizens not of a small parcel of the world that changes according to the currents of politics, according to the wars, to what occurs, but to feel that the whole world is our country."
— Jorge Luis Borges

"To think, analyze and invent, he [Pierre Menard] also wrote me, “are not anomalous acts, but the normal respiration of the intelligence. To glorify the occasional fulfillment of this function, to treasure ancient thoughts of others, to remember with incredulous amazement that the doctor universal is thought, is to confess our languor or barbarism. Every man should be capable of all ideas, and I believe that in the future he will be." (Jorge Luis Borges, "Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote, 1939)"
— Jorge Luis Borges

"[...] man's memory shapes
Its own Eden within [...]"
— Jorge Luis Borges (Dreamtigers)

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

"Quando um indivíduo cria algo, digamos, uma composição musical, um romance, uma pintura, um filme, um vídeo, esse indivíduo se torna um autor, quer dizer, alguém que é capaz de deixar marcas, traços de seu modo próprio de criar mensagens em um processo de signos com o qual lida. O autor é aquele que interfere de modo particular e pessoal em um processo de signos."
— Jorge Luis Borges

"La literatura no es otra cosa que un sueño dirigido."
— Jorge Luis Borges

"...Me dijo que su libro se llamaba el Libro de Arena, porque ni el libro ni la arena tienen ni principio ni fin..."
— Jorge Luis Borges