736 Quotes by Jorge Luis Borges

The dictionary is based on the hypothesis -- obviously an unproven one -- that languages are made up of equivalent synonyms.

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.

A veces en las tardes una caraNos mira desde el fondo de un espejo;El arte debe ser como ese espejoQue nos revela nuestra propia cara.(At times in the evenings a faceLooks at us out of the depths of a mirror;Art should be like that mirrorWhich reveals to us our own face.)

Being with you and not being with you is the only way I have to measure time.

Leaving behind the babble of the plaza, I enter the Library. I feel, almost physically, the gravitation of the books, the enveloping serenity of order, time magically dessicated and preserved.

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.

I have no way of knowing whether the events that I am about to narrate are effects or causes.

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.

The thought came over me that never would one full and absolute moment, containing all the others, justify my life, that all of my instants would be provisional phases, annihilators of the past turned to face the future, and that beyond the episodic, the present, the circumstantial, we were nobody.