35 phrases by Jorge Luís Borges to get to know the Argentine writer

I always imagined that paradise was a kind of library.

A person becomes great by what he reads and not by what he writes.

A blind man is a prisoner. I’ve been blind for a long time. I started to go blind when I started to see.

Nature is that beautiful mystery that neither psychology nor rhetoric can decipher.

Life is nothing but death that is shining.

It seems easy to me to live without hate, which I have never felt, but to live without love I find it impossible.

Old age could be the supreme loneliness, were it not for death an even greater loneliness.

I’m skeptical, but I don’t congratulate myself on that. I want young people to have the right to hope.

Memory is essential, since literature is made of dreams and dreams are made by combining memories.

I already suspected that the only thing without mystery is happiness, because it justifies itself.

We are a dream without a dreamer. This dreaming is called universal history, and each of us is a symbol of that dream.

Democracy is a statistical error, because in democracy the majority decides and the majority is made up of imbeciles.

To fall in love is to create a religion, whose God is fallible.

Death uses me incessantly.

In a newspaper, generally, news is written. Of course, silly. The news that the newspapers give refer to topics that do not interest me.

One should only read books written more than a hundred years ago.

Life is conjecture.

The image that a man can only conceive is that he touches no one.

The new moon. She also looks at her from another door.

Time does not exist. It’s just a convention.

Perhaps a man in love is not wrong. Perhaps those who are not in love are wrong.

I am alone and there is no one in the mirror.

Do not hate your enemy, for if you do, you are his slave. Your hate will never be better than your peace.

Old age can be our time of happiness. The animal is dead, or nearly dead. Remains the man and the soul.

What remains of books is what memory allows, that form of oblivion that retains the format, not the meaning, and which reflects only the titles.

Give the saint to the dogs, throw your pearls to the swine; what matters is giving.

Fatherhood and mirrors are abominable because they multiply the number of men.

There is nothing more skillful than the thought we choose for our misfortunes.

Do not accumulate gold on Earth, because gold is the father of idleness, and idleness, of sadness and boredom.

As long as remorse lasts, guilt lasts.

Hell and heaven seem disproportionate to me. The deeds of men do not deserve so much.

My advice is to stay out of stories people can comment on.

Doing good to your enemy can be a work of justice, and it is not difficult; loving him is the task of angels and not of men.

Let every man build his own cathedral. Why live on ancient and foreign works of art?

The weight of the past is infinite.