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"The metaphysicians of Tlön are not looking for truth, nor even for an approximation of it; they are after a kind of amazement."
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"The Bible warns [parents] against extremes in dealing with our adult children. It tells us to avoid trying to control [them] once they become adults. When children become independent, a major transition takes place: They are no longer under our authority."

"This heart within me I can feel, and I judge that it exists. This world I can touch, and I likewise judge that it exists. There ends all my knowledge, and the rest is construction. (...) Forever I shall be a stranger to myself."

"I am engaged in spiritual warfare every day. I must never let down my guard-I must keep armed."

"Who gave fire permission to burn?"

"But if I feel, may I never express? "Never! declared Reason.I groaned under her bitter sternness. Never - never - oh, hard word! This hag, this Reason, would not let me look up, or smile, or hope; she could not rest unless I were altogether crushed, cowed, broken-in, and broken down. According to her, I was born only to work for a piece of bread, to await the pains of death, and steadily through all life to despond. Reason might be right; yet no wonder we are glad at times to defy her, to rush from under her rod and give a truant hour to Imagination - her soft, bright foe, our sweet Help, our divine Hope."

"...because wherever else the future leads, it leads ultimately to death, the end that is present in my beginning and in yours."

"Why is it that the cross has become the symbol of Christianity? It is because at the cross Jesus purchased our redemptionand provided a righteousness which we could not ourselves earn."

"Do not become more useful than God."

"Those who expect to be both ignorant and free, expect what never was and never will be."

"Everything at some point has been declared the root of all evil."
Explore more quotes by Jorge Luis Borges

"I foresee that man will resign himself each day to new abominations, and soon that only bandits and soldiers will be left."

"The gods weave misfortunes for men, so that the generations to come will have something to sing about. Mallarmé repeats, less beautifully, what Homer said; "tout aboutit en un livre, everything ends up in a book. The Greeks speak of generations that will sing; Mallarmé speaks of an object, of a thing among things, a book. But the idea is the same; the idea that we are made for art, we are made for memory, we are made for poetry, or perhaps we are made for oblivion. But something remains, and that something is history or poetry, which are not essentially different."

"Nothing is built on stone; all is built on sand, but we must build as if the sand were stone."

"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."

"And so, as I sleep, some dream beguiles me, and suddenly I know I dream.Then I think: this is a dream, a pure diversion of my will; now that I have unlimited power, I am going to create a tiger.Oh incompetence! Never do my dreams engender the wild beast I longed for.The tiger indeed appears, but stuffed or flimsy, or with impure variations of shape, or of an implausible size, or all too fleeting, or with a touch of the dog or bird."

"I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities I have visited."

"In the order of literature, as in others, there is no act that is not the coronation of an infinite series of causes and the source of an infinite series of effects."
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