Jorge Luis Borges

“Nada hay menos material que el dinero, ya que cualquier moneda (una moneda de veinte centavos, digamos) es, en rigor, un repertorio de futuros posibles. El dinero es abstracto, repetí, el dinero es tiempo futuro. Puede ser una tarde en las afueras, puede ser música de Brahms, puede ser mapas, puede ser ajedrez, puede ser café, puede ser las palabras de Epicteto, que enseñan el desprecio del oro; es un Proteo más versátil que el de la isla de Pharos. Es tiempo imprevisible, tiempo de Bergson, no duro tiempo del Islam o de Pórtico”

“En Alejandría se ha dicho que sólo es incapaz de una culpa quien ya la cometió y ya se arrepintió; para estar libre de un error, agreguemos, conviene haberlo profesado”

“Ensayé diversas explicaciones; no me bastó ninguna. Pensé: Me satisface la derrota, porque secretamente me sé culpable y sólo puede redimirme el castigo. Pensé: Me satisface la derrota, porque es un fin y yo estoy muy cansado. Pensé: Me satisface la derrota, porque ha ocurrido, porque está innumerablemente unida todos los hechos que son, que fueron, que serán, porque censurar o deplorar un solo hecho real es blasfemar del universo. Esas razones ensayé, hasta dar con la verdadera”

“This has happened and will happen again,' said Euphorbus. 'You are not lighting a pyre, you are lighting a labyrinth of flames. If all the fires I have seen were gathered together here, they would not fit on earth and the angels would be blinded. I have said this many times.' Then he cried out, because the flames had reached him.”

“God is more generous than men and will measure them by a different standard.”

“He had no document but his memory; the training he had acquired with each added hexameter gave him a discipline unsuspected by those who set down and forget temporary, incomplete paragraphs. He was not working for posterity or even for God, whose literary tastes were unknown to him. Meticulously, motionlessly, secretly, he wrought in time his lofty, invisible labyrinth. He worked the third act over twice. He eliminated certain symbols as over-obvious, such as the repeated striking of the clock, the music. Nothing hurried him. He omitted, he condensed, he amplified. In certain instances he came back to the original version. He came to feel affection for the courtyard, the barracks; one of the faces before him modified his conception of Roemerstadt's character. He discovered that the wearying cacophonies that bothered Flaubert so much are mere visual superstitions, weakness and limitation of the written word, not the spoken...He concluded his drama. He had only the problem of a single phrase. He found it. The drop of water slid down his cheek. He opened his mouth in a maddened cry, moved his face, dropped under the quadruple blast.”

“At first cautiously, later indifferently, at last desperately, I wandered up the stairs and along the pavement of the inextricable palace. (Afterwards I learned that the width and height of the steps were not constant, a fact which made me understand the singular fatigue they produced). 'This palace is a fabrication of the gods,' I thought at the beginning. I explored the uninhabited interiors and corrected myself: ' The gods who built it have died.' I noted its peculiarities and said: 'The gods who built it were mad.' I said it, I know, with an incomprehensible reprobation which was almost remorse, with more intellectual horror than palpable fear......'This City' (I thought) 'is so horrible that its mere existence and perdurance, though in the midst of a secret desert, contaminates the past and the future and in some way even jeopardizes the stars.”

“When writers die they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarnation."[As attributed by Alastair Reid in Neruda and Borges, The New Yorker, June 24, 1996; as well as in The Talk of the Town, The New Yorker, July 7, 1986]”

“We can handle all European themes, handle them without superstition, with an irreverence which can have, and already does have, fortunate consequences.”

“The aesthetic event is something as evident, as immediate, as indefinable as love, the taste of fruit, as water. We feel poetry as we feel the closeness of a woman, or as we feel a mountain or a bay. If we feel it immediately, why dilute it further with words, which no doubt will be weaker than our feelings?”

“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.”

“Of all man’s instruments, the most wondrous, no doubt, is the book. The other instruments are extensions of his body. The microscope, the telescope, are extensions of his sight; the telephone is the extension of his voice; then we have the plow and the sword, extensions of the arm. But the book is something else altogether: the book is an extension of memory and imagination.”

“Yo he escrito también algunos cuentos en los cuales traté ambiciosa e inultimente de ser Kafka”

“Wątpliwe, aby świat miał sens; jeszcze bardziej wątpliwe, aby miał sens podwójny lub potrójny, zauważy niedowiarek. Ja sądzę, że tak właśnie jest; (...).”

“Happy are the beloved and the lovers and those who can live without love.”

“All language is a set of symbols whose use among its speakers assumes a share past”

“Hay que tener cuidado al elegir a los enemigos porque uno termina pareciéndose a ellos.”

“As coisasA bengala, as modeas, o chaveiro, A dócil fechadura, as tardiasNotas que não lerão os poucos diasQue me restam, os naipes e o tabuleiro,Um livro e em suas páginas a desvanecidaVioleta, monumento de uma tardeSem dúvida inesquecível e já esquecida,O rubo espelho ocidental em que ardeUma ilusória aurora. Quantas coisas,Limas, umbrais, atlas, taças, cravos,Servem-nos, como tácitos escravos, cegas e estranhamente sigilosas!Durarão para além de nosso esquecimentoNunca saberão que partimos em um momento.”

“Pokušao bih uvijek imati lijepe trenutke, Jer se jedino od toga sastoji život, od trenutaka. Kada bih se mogao vratiti unatrag, borio bih se da nikada ne izgubim "sada”

“The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite, perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries.”

“My taste runs to hourglasses, maps, seventeenth-century typefaces, etymologies, the taste of coffee, and the prose of Robert Louis Stevenson.”

“All theories are legitimate, no matter. What matters is what you do with them.”

“La realidad no suele coincidir con las previsiones; con lógica perversa, prever un detalle circunstancial es impedir que este suceda”

“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.”

“Desvario laborioso e empobrecedor é o de compor vastos livros; o de espraiar por quinhentas páginas uma ideia cuja perfeita exposição oral cabe em poucos minutos.”

“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 task of art is to transform what is continuously happening to us, to transform all of these things into symbols, into music, into something which can last in man’s memory. That is our duty. If we don’t fulfill it, we feel unhappy.”

“Czym są w końcu słowa? Słowa to symbole naszych wspólnych wspomnień. Kiedy używam danego słowa, spodziewam się, że czytelnicy posiadają pewne doświadczenia, związane z jego znaczeniem.”

“Paradise will be a kind of library”

“The three of them knew it. She was Kafka’s mistress. Kafka had dreamt her. The three of them knew it. He was Kafka’s friend. Kafka had dreamt him. The three of them knew it. The woman said to the friend, Tonight I want you to have me. The three of them knew it. The man replied: If we sin, Kafka will stop dreaming us. One of them knew it. There was no longer anyone on earth. Kafka said to himself Now the two of them have gone, I’m left alone. I’ll stop dreaming myself.”

“I had always imagined Paradise as a kind of library.- Blindness”

“Mi carne puede tener miedo; yo, no.”

“(...) antes de entrar en batalla, nadie sabía quién es. Alguien podía pensarse cobarde y ser un valiente, y asimismo al revés (...)”

“Como todo poseedor de una biblioteca, Aureliano se sabía culpable de no conocerla hasta el fin”

“Ser inmortal es baladí; menos el hombre, todas las criaturas lo son, pues ignoran la muerte; lo divino, lo terrible, lo incomprensible, es saberse inmortal.”

“Fácilmente aceptamos la realidad, acaso porque intuimos que nada es Real”

“A man sets himself the task of portraying the world. Shortly before he dies he discovers that this patient labyrinth of lines is a drawing of his own face.”

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

“El hombre olvida que es un muerto que conversa con muertos.”

“La ceguera gradual no es cosa trágica. Es como un lento atardecer de verano.”

“Que el cielo exista, aunque mi lugar sea el infierno.”

“(...) pero en mi niñez he visto hombres viejos que largamente se ocultaban en las letrinas, con unos discos de metal en un cubilete prohibido, y débilmente remedaban el divino desorden.”

“Algo de sacerdote había en él y también de marino.”

“Llegué a abominar de mi cuerpo, llegué a sentir que dos ojos, dos manos, dos pulmones, son tan monstruosos como dos caras.”

“La casa no es tan grande, pensó. La agrandan la penumbra, la simetría, los espejos, los muchos años, mi desconocimiento, la soledad.”

“(...) tal vez todos sabemos profundamente que somos inmortales y que tarde o temprano, todo hombre hará todas las cosas y sabrá todo.”

“(...) Babilonia no es otra cosa que un infinito juego de azares.”

“Buckley descree de Dios, pero quiere demostrar al Dios no existente que los hombres mortales son capaces de concebir un mundo.”

“Las cosas se duplican en Tlön; propenden asimismo a borrarse ya perder los detalles cuando los olvida la gente. Es clásico el ejemplo de un umbral que perduró mientras lo visitaba un mendigo y que se perdió de vista a su muerte. A veces unos pájaros, un caballo han salvado las ruinas de un anfiteatro.”

“With relief, with humiliation, with terror, he understood that he too was a mere appearance, dreamt by another.”