A book is a physical object in a world of physical objects. It is a set of dead symbols. And then the right reader comes along, and the words – or rather the poetry behind the words, for the words themselves are mere symbols – spring to life, and we have a resurrection of the word.

— Jorge Luis Borges

Reading

Jorge Luis Borges Quotes

A classic book is a book which generations of men, driven by various reasons, read with that same initial fervor and that same mysterious loyalty.

— Jorge Luis Borges

Like all the men of Babylon, I have been proconsul; like all, I have been a slave. I have known omnipotence, ignominy, imprisonment.

— Jorge Luis Borges

I reread these negative remarks and realize that I do not know whether music can despair of music or marble of marble. I do know that literature is an art that can foresee the time when it will be silenced, an art that can become inflamed with its own virtue, fall in love with its own decline, and court its own demise.

— Jorge Luis Borges

I’m alone and nobody is in the mirror.

— Jorge Luis Borges

Methodical writing distracts me from the present condition of men. But the certainty that everything has been already written nullifies or makes phantoms of us all.

— Jorge Luis Borges

The indecipherable dust, once Shakespeare.

— Jorge Luis Borges

I know very little of my own work by heart, because I don’t like what I write. In fact, I find myself personally expressed far better in the writings of other poets than in my own, because I know all my mistakes – I know all the chinks and all the padding, I know that a particular line is weak, and so on. I read other poets in a different way; I don’t look too closely at them.

— Jorge Luis Borges

When the clocks of midnight squander a generous time, I will go further than Ulysses’ oarsmen to the realm of dreams, inaccessible to human nature. From that underwater region, I rescue fragments that I do not begin to understand.

— Jorge Luis Borges

Reality may be too complex for oral transmission; legend recreates it in a manner which is only accidentally false and which allows it to go about the world, from mouth to mouth.

— Jorge Luis Borges

I’m sorry to say that people have written fifty or sixty books about me. I haven’t read a single one of them, since I know too much of the subject, and I’m sick and tired of it.

— Jorge Luis Borges

Work that endures is always capable of an infinite and plastic ambiguity; it is all things for all men, like the Apostle; it is a mirror that reflects the reader’s own features and it is also a map of the world. Moreover, all this must come about in an evanescent and modest way, almost in spite of the author, who must appear to be ignorant of any and all symbolism.

— Jorge Luis Borges

He was the solitary lucid spectator of a multiform, momentaneous, and almost unbearably precise world.

— Jorge Luis Borges

Todos los hechos pueden ocurrirle a un hombre, desde el instante de su nacimiento hasta el de su muerte, han sido prefijados por el. Asi, toda negligencia es deliberada, todo casual encuentro una cita, toda humillacion una penitencia, todo fracaso una misteriosa victoria, toda muerte un suicidio. No hay consuelo mas habil que el pensamiento de que hemos elegido nuestras desdichas.

— Jorge Luis Borges

O Time thy pyramids.

— Jorge Luis Borges

Borelius inquires mockingly: “Why didn’t he renounce his renunciation? Or renounce the idea of renouncing his renunciation?

— Jorge Luis Borges

I offer her that kernel of myself that I have saved, somehow – the central heart that deals not in words, traffics not with dreams and is untouched by time, by joy, by adversities.

— Jorge Luis Borges

All men, in the vertiginous moment of coitus, are the same man. All men who repeat a line from Shakespeare are William Shakespeare.

— Jorge Luis Borges

I don’t speak of vengeance, nor of forgiving; forgetting is the only revenge and the only forgiveness.

— Jorge Luis Borges

In the depths of the siesta amorous doves called huskily;.

— Jorge Luis Borges

Every so many years, he went to England to visit – judging by the photographs he showed us – a sundial and some oak trees.

— Jorge Luis Borges

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