Get ready to dive deep into the labyrinthine mind of Jorge Luis Borges, a literary titan whose enigmatic, thought-provoking quotes never cease to spark inspiration. “50 Intellectual Jorge Luis Borges Quotes” is not just an ordinary compilation, but a portal to another dimension where reality is blended with the mystical and the philosophical. The intellectual landscape Borges sketched with his words is nothing short of awe-inspiring, making “Jorge Luis Borges Quotes” a treasure trove for curious minds hungry for a taste of his intellectual genius.
Now, did you know that Borges, who is known for his complex narratives and labyrinthine metaphors, once worked as a librarian? Talk about life imitating art! In fact, his years of silently traversing the endless aisles of books had a profound influence on his work. An iconic example is his quote, “I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.” Reading through these “Intellectual Jorge Luis Borges Quotes,” you'll feel as if you're wandering the same vast corridors of wisdom that Borges once did. So grab your metaphorical torch and let's start exploring these profound quotes from Borges' intricate mind. Buckle up, because this is going to be a ride to remember!
The Labyrinth of Reality and Illusion
1. “I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.”
2. “Reality is not always probable, or likely.”
3. “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.”
4. “Nothing is built on stone; All is built on sand, but we must build as if the sand were stone.”
5. “To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god.”
6. “The mind was dreaming. The world was its dream.”
7. “I cannot sleep unless I am surrounded by books.”
8. “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 I have visited.”
9. “Life itself is a quotation.”
10. “Any life is made up of a single moment, the moment in which a man finds out, once and for all, who he is.”
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On Writing and Imagination
- “Writing is nothing more than a guided dream.”
- “Words are symbols that postulate shared memories.”
- “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.”
- “A writer—and, I believe, generally all persons—must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource.”
- “Literature is not exhaustible, for the sufficient and simple reason that a single book is not. A book is not an isolated entity: it is a narration, an axis of innumerable narrations.”
- “I have known uncertainty: a state unknown to the Greeks.”
- “Reading…is an activity subsequent to writing: more resigned, more civil, more intellectual.”
- “Let others pride themselves about how many pages they have written; I'd rather boast about the ones I've read.”
- “Truly fine poetry must be read aloud. A good poem does not allow itself to be read in a low voice or silently.”
- “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.”
The Beauty of Paradoxes
- “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.”
- “In general, every country has the language it deserves.”
- “The original is unfaithful to the translation.”
- “Mirrors and copulation are abominable, since they both multiply the numbers of men.”
- “Being with you and not being with you is the only way I have to measure time.”
- “The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite and perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries.”
- “I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.”
- “Time 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.”
- “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.”
- “There is no exercise of the intellect which is not, in the final analysis, useless.”
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The Power of Memory and Time
- “Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire.”
- “The past is indestructible; sooner or later things turn up.”
- “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.”
- “We are our memory, we are that chimerical museum of shifting shapes, that pile of broken mirrors.”
- “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 I have visited.”
- “When you reach my age, you realize you couldn't have done things very much better or much worse than you did them in the first place.”
- “I have committed the worst of sins one can commit… I have not been happy.”
- “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.”
- “Every writer “creates” his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.”
- “We (the indivisible divinity that works in us) have dreamed the world. We have dreamed it resistant, mysterious, visible, ubiquitous in space and firm in time, but we have allowed slight, and eternal, bits of the irrational to form part of its architecture so as to know that it is false.”
The Enigma of Infinity
- “I believe that the phrase ‘obligatory reading' is a contradiction in terms; reading should not be obligatory. Should we ever speak of ‘obligatory pleasure'? What for? Pleasure is not obligatory, pleasure is something we seek. Obligatory happiness? We seek happiness as well.”
- “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.”
- “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.”
- “A book is not an isolated being: it is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships.”
- “In the critic's vocabulary, the word ‘precursor' is indispensable, but it should be cleansed of all connotations of polemics 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.”
- “We accept reality so readily – perhaps because we sense that nothing is real.”
- “There's no need to build a labyrinth when the entire universe is one.”
- “In the immensity of time and the variety of the world the same motif recurs endlessly.”
- “The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite, perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries.”
- “I have sometimes suspected that the only thing without mystery is happiness, because it justifies itself.”
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