Jorge Luis Borges (24 August 1899 – 14 June 1986) was an Argentine writer who is considered one of the foremost literary figures of the 20th century.
Most famous in the English speaking world for his short stories and fictive essays, Borges was also a poet, critic, translator and man of letters.



Words by Jorge Luis Borges

1.
"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." ----- J.L. Borges


2.
"Doubt is one of the names of intelligence."


3.
"May Heaven exist, even if my place is Hell.
Let me be tortured and battered and annihilated,
but let there be one instant, one creature,
wherein thy enormous Library may find its justification."

4.
"Dictatorships foster oppression, dictatorships foster servitude, dictatorships foster cruelty; more abominable is the fact that they foster idiocy.
(Statement to the Argentine Society of Letters, c.1946)

5.
I would define the baroque as that style that deliberately exhausts (or tries to exhaust) its own possibilities, and that borders on self-caricature.
The baroque is the final stage in all art, when art flaunts and squanders its resources.
(A Universal History of Iniquity, preface to the 1954 edition)

6.
Do you want to see what human eyes have never seen?
Look at the moon.
Do you want to hear what ears have never heard?
Listen to the bird's cry.
Do you want to touch what hands have never touched?
Touch the earth.
Verily I say that God is about to create the world.
(The Theologians)


7.
Years of solitude had taught him that, in one's memory, all days tend to be the same, but that there is not a day, not even in jail or in the hospital, which does not bring surprises, which is not a translucent network of minimal surprises.
(The Waiting)



8.
Being with you and not being with you is the only way I have to measure time.
(The Threatened)


9.
Truly fine poetry must be read aloud. A good poem does not allow itself to be read in a low voice or silently. If we can read it silently, it is not a valid poem: a poem demands pronunciation.
Poetry always remembers that it was an oral art before it was a written art. It remembers that it was first song.
(The Divine Comedy) (1977)

10.
Time carries him as the river carries
A leaf in the downstream water.
No matter. The enchanted one insists
And shapes God with delicate geometry.
Since his illness, since his birth,
He goes on constructing God with the word.
The mightiest love was granted him
Love that does not expect to be loved.
(Baruch Spinoza)

you look like the world in your attitude of giving.