"Time is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire."
Read quote
13 likes
Quote collection
Jorge Luis Borges quotes (page 5 of 17)
334 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"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."
Read quote
13 likes
"Days and nights passed over this despair of flesh, but one morning he awoke, looked (with calm now) at the blurred things that lay about him, and felt, inexplicably, the way one might feel upon recognizing a melody or a voice, that all this had happened to him before and that he had faced it with fear but also with joy and hopefulness and curiosity. Then he descended into his memory, which seemed to him endless, and managed to draw up from that vertigo the lost remembrance that gleamed like a coin in the rain - perhaps because he had never really looked at it except (perhaps) in a dream."
Read quote
13 likes
"The dictionary is based on the hypothesis -- obviously an unproven one -- that languages are made up of equivalent synonyms."
Read quote
13 likes
"If space is infinite, we may be at any point in space. If time is infinite, we may be at any point in time."
Read quote
12 likes
"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."
Read quote
12 likes
"Democracy is an abuse of statistics."
Read quote
12 likes
"Personally, I am a hedonistic reader; I have never read a book merely because it was ancient. I read books for the aesthetic emotions they offer me, and I ignore the commentaries and criticism."
Read quote
12 likes
"Captivated by its discipline, humanity forgets and goes on forgetting that it is the discipline of chess players, not of angels."
Read quote
12 likes
"In general, every country has the language it deserves."
Read quote
11 likes
"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."
Read quote
11 likes
"Another school declares that all time has already transpired and that our life is only the crepuscular and no doubt falsified and mutilated memory or reflection of an irrecoverable process."
Read quote
11 likes
"Reality may avoid the obligation to be interesting, but ... hypotheses may not."
Read quote
11 likes
"I am not sure of anything, I know nothing . . . can you imagine that I don't even know the date of my own death?"
Read quote
10 likes
"I think of reading a book as no less an experience than travelling or falling in love."
Read quote
10 likes
"What I'm really concerned about is reaching one person. And that person may be myself for all I know."
Read quote
10 likes
"Every man should be capable of all ideas."
Read quote
10 likes
"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 esthetic event."
Read quote
10 likes
"I write for myself, and perhaps for half a dozen friends. And that should be enough. And that might improve the quality of my writing. But if I were writing for thousands of people, then I would write what might please them. And as I know nothing about them, and maybe I'd have a rather low opinion of them, I don't think that would do any good to my work."
Read quote
9 likes
"Each thing implies the universe."
Read quote
9 likes