Jorge Luis Borges Quotes

The flattery of posterity is not worth much more than contemporary flattery, which is worth nothing.

Jorge Luis Borges

Myth is at the beginning of literature, and also at its end.

Jorge Luis Borges

There is a flavor that our time (perhaps surfeited by the clumsy imitations of professional patriots) does not usually perceive without some suspicion: the fundamental flavor of the heroic.

Jorge Luis Borges

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.

Jorge Luis Borges

To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god.

Jorge Luis Borges

The future is inevitable and precise, but it may not occur. God lurks in the gaps.

Jorge Luis Borges

Universal history is the history of a few metaphors.

Jorge Luis Borges

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.

Jorge Luis Borges

On the floor, and hanging on to the bar, squatted an old man, immobile as an object. His years had reduced and polished him as water does a stone or the generations of men do a sentence. He was dark, dried up , diminutive, and seemed outside time, situated in eternity.

Jorge Luis Borges

Like every writer, he measured the virtues of other writers by their performance, and asked that they measure him by what he conjectured or planned.

Jorge Luis Borges

The execution was set for the 29th of March, at nine in the morning. This delay was due to a desire on the part of the authorities to act slowly and impersonally, in the manner of planets or vegetables.

Jorge Luis Borges

That history should have imitated history was already sufficiently marvellous; that history should imitate literature is inconceivable....

Jorge Luis Borges

The truth is that we live out our lives putting off all that can be put off; perhaps we all know deep down that we are immortal and that sooner or later all men will do and know all things.

Jorge Luis Borges

In a riddle whose answer is chess, what is the only prohibited word?

Jorge Luis Borges

I leave to the various futures (not to all) my garden of forking paths.

Jorge Luis Borges