Jorge Luis Borges

“I do not know whether music knows how to despair over music, or marble over marble, but literature is an art which knows how to prophesize the time in which it might have fallen silent, how to attack its own virtue, and how to fall in love with its own dissolution and court its own end.”

“I believe that in time we will have reached the point where we will deserve to be free of government.”

“In all fiction, when a man is faced with alternatives he chooses one at the expense of the others. In the almost unfathomable Ts'ui Pen, he chooses – simultaneously – all of them. He thus creates various futures, various times which start others that will in their turn branch out and bifurcate in other times. That is the cause of the contradictions in the novel.”

“Poetry remembers that it was an oral art before it was a written art.”

“Paradise will be a kind of library”

“From my weakness, I drew strength that never left me.”

“I have known uncertainty: a state unknown to the Greeks.”

“Like all those possessing a library, Aurelian was aware that he was guilty of not knowing his in its entirety.”

“Sometimes, looking at the many books I have at home, I feel I shall die before I come to the end of them, yet I cannot resist the temptation of buying new books. Whenever I walk into a bookstore and find a book on one of my hobbies — for example, Old English or Old Norse poetry — I say to myself, “What a pity I can’t buy that book, for I already have a copy at home.”

“I kept asking myself how a book could be infinite. I could not imagine any other than a cyclic volume, circular. A volume whose last page would be the same as the first and so have the possibility of continuing indefinitely.”

“There are those who seek the love of a woman to forget her, to not think about her.”

“I do not know which of us has written this page.”

“To die for a religion is easier than to live it absolutely.”

“Literature is not exhaustible, for the sufficient and simple reason that a single book is not.”

“If honor and wisdom and happiness are not for me, let them be for others. Let heaven exist, though my place be in hell.”

“Reality is not always probable, or likely.”

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

“There is an hour of the afternoon when the plain is on the verge of saying something. It never says, or perhaps it says it infinitely, or perhaps we do not understand it, or we understand it and it is untranslatable as music.”

“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.”

“Heaven and hell seem out of proportion to me: the actions of men do not deserve so much.”