Jorge Luis Borges Quotes That Will Inspire You to Live Your Best Life

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

2. There are objects made up of two sense elements, one visual, the other auditory—the colour of a sunrise and the distant call of a bird. Other objects are made up of many elements—the sun, the water against the swimmer's chest, the vague quivering pink which one sees when the eyes are closed, the feeling of being swept away by a river or by sleep. These second degree objects can be combined with others; using certain abbreviations, the process is practically an infinite one. There are famous poems made up of one enormous word, a word which in truth forms a poetic object, the creation of the writer. The fact that no one believes that nouns refer to an actual reality means, paradoxically enough, that there is no limit to the numbers of them. Ficciones

3. Boast of QuietnessWritings of light assault the darkness, more prodigious than meteors.The tall unknowable city takes over the countryside.Sure of my life and death, I observe the ambitious and would like tounderstand them.Their day is greedy as a lariat in the air.Their night is a rest from the rage within steel, quick to attack.They speak of humanity.My humanity is in feeling we are all voices of that same poverty.They speak of homeland.My homeland is the rhythm of a guitar, a few portraits, an old sword,the willow grove's visible prayer as evening falls.Time is living me.More silent than my shadow, I pass through the loftily covetous multitude.They are indispensable, singular, worthy of tomorrow.My name is someone and anyone.I walk slowly, like one who comes from so far away he doesn't expect to arrive.

4. El concepto de arte comprometido es una ingenuidad porque nadie sabe del todo lo que ejecuta.(The notion of art as a compromise is a simplification, for no one knows entirely what they are doing.) Selected Poems

5. Let not the rash marble riskgarrulous breaches of oblivion's omnipotence,in many words recallingname, renown, events, birthplace.All those glass jewels are best left in the dark.Let not the marble say what men do not.The essentials of the dead man's life--the trembling hope,the implacable miracle of pain, the wonder of sensual delight--will abide forever.Blindly the uncertain soul asks to continuewhen it is the lives of others that will make that happen,as you yourself are the mirror and imageof those who did not live as long as youand others will be (and are) your immortality on earth. Selected Poems

6. Science is a finite sphere that grows in infinite space; each new expansion makes it include a larger zone of the unknown, but the unknown is inexhaustable. Selected Non-Fictions

7. 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. This Craft of Verse

8. 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. Selected Non-Fictions

9. The truth is that we all live by leaving behind; no doubt we all profoundly know that we are immortal and that sooner or later every man will do all things and know everything. Ficciones

10. There are official searchers, inquisitors. I have seen them in the performance of their function: they always arrive extremely tired from their journeys; they speak of a broken stairway which almost killed them; they talk with the librarian of galleries and stairs; sometimes they pick up the nearest volume and leaf through it, looking for infamous words. Obviously, no one expects to discover anything. The Library of Babel

11. This web of time – the strands of which approach one another, bifurcate, intersect or ignore each other through the centuries – embraces every possibility. We do not exist in most of them. In some you exist and not I, while in others I do, and you do not. The Garden of Forking Paths

12. Time forks perpetually toward innumerable futures. In one of them I am your enemy. Collected Fictions

13. Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river that carries me away, but I am the river

14. Whatever one man does, it is as if all men did it. For that reason, it is not unfair that one disobedience in a garden should contaminate all humanity; for that reason it is not unjust that the crucifixion of a single Jew should be sufficient to save it. Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings