… in art nothing is more secondary than the author’s intentions.

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...

They seek neither truth nor likelihood; they seek astonishment. They think metaphysics is a branch of the literature of fantasy

I have no way of knowing whether the events that I am about to narrate are effects or causes.

La duda es uno de los nombres de la inteligencia.

Many of the characters are fools and they’re always playing tricks on meand treating me badly.

Literature is not exhaustible, for the sufficient and simple reason that a single book is not.

I believe that in time we will have reached the point where we will deserve to be free of government.

All things left her, allBut one. Her highborn courtlinessAccompanied her to the end,Beyond the rapture and its eclipse,In a way like an angel’s. Of ElviraThe first thing that I saw – such years ago -Was...

Learning After some time, you learn the subtle difference betweenholding a handand imprisoning a soul;You learn that love does not equal sex,and that company does not equal security,and you start to learn….That kisses are not...

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

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...

Od pierwszego Adama, który ujrzał noc,I dzień, i kształt swojej dłoni,Ludzie snuli opowieści i utrwalaliW kamieniu, w metalu czy na pergaminieTo wszystko, co zawiera ziemia czy co tworzy sen.Oto ich dzieło: Biblioteka.Powiadają, że liczba jej...

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...

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.

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...

I believe the secret of the success of psychoanalysis resides in people’s vanity.

What a pity I can’t buy that book, for I already have a copy at home.

En mi época no había Best-Sellers y no podíamos prostituírnos. No había quien comprara nuestra prostitución.

Cervantes’ text and Menard’s are verbally identical; but the second is almost infinitely richer.

In Sumatra, someone wishes to receive a doctorate in prophecy. The master seer who administers his exam asks if he will fail or pass. the candidate replies that he will fail. … One can already...

Let others pride themselves about how many pages they have written; I’d rather boast about the ones I’ve read.

If you sell, say, two thousand copies, it is the same thing as if you had sold nothing at all because two thousand is too vast—I mean, for the imagination to grasp. While thirty-seven people—perhaps...

Akheronin sisuksissa on kyyneliä, hammasten kiristystä, utua, tulta, sietämätöntä poltetta, jäätävää kylmyyttä, koiria, karhuja, leijonia ja käärmeitä. Tässä legendassa helvetti on eläin, jonka sisällä on muita eläimiä.

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...

Reality is not always probable, or likely.

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

Hay quienes no pueden imaginar un mundo sin pájaros; hay quienes no pueden imaginar un mundo sin agua; en lo que a mi se refiere, soy incapaz de imaginar un mundo sin libros.

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...

So witless did these ideas strike me as being, so sweeping and pompous the way they were expressed, that I associated them immediately with literature.

So my life is a point-counterpoint, a kind of fugue, and a falling away–and everything winds up being lost to me, and everything falls into oblivion, or into the hands of the other man.

When a writer dies, he becomes his books.

A book is more than a verbal structure or series of verbal structures; it is the dialogue it establishes with its reader and the intonation it imposes upon his voice and the changing and durable...

We are ignorant of the meaning of the dragon in the same way that we are ignorant of the meaning of the universe; but there is something in the dragon’s image that fits man’s imagination,...

He [Omar Khayyam] is an atheist, but knows how to interpret in orthodox style the most difficult passages of the Koran; for every educated man is a theologian and faith is not a requisite.

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...

Another school declares that all time has already transpired and that our life is only the crepuscular and no doubt falsified and mutilated memory or reflection of an irrecoverable process.

The Library is a sphere whose exact centre is any one of its hexagons and whose circumference is inaccessible.

It is generally understood that a modern-day book may honorably be based upon an older one, especially since, as Dr. Johnson observed, no man likes owing anything to his contemporaries. The repeated but irrelevant points...

He was very religious; he believed that he had a secret pact with God which exempted him from doing good in exchange for prayers and piety.

Bana aynı anda hem 800,000 kitabı hem de karanlığı veren Tanrı’nın muhteşem ironisi

Heaven and hell seem out of proportion to me: the actions of men do not deserve so much.

Art is fire plus algebra.

Personally, I am a hedonistic reader; I have never read a book merely because it was ancient. I read books for the aesthetic emotions they offer me, and I ignore the commentaries and criticism.

Como todos los hombres de la Biblioteca, he viajado en mi juventud; he peregrinado en busca de un libro, acaso del catálogo de catálogos; ahora que mis ojos casi no pueden descifrar lo que escribo,...

–,all our lives we postpone everything that can be postponed; perhaps we all have the certainty, deep inside, that we are immortal and sooner or later every man will do everything, know all there is...

Emma dropped the paper. Her first impression was of a weak feeling in her stomach and in her knees; then of blind guilt, of unreality, of coldness, of fear; then she wished that it were...

I suspected once that any human life, however intricate and full it might be, consisted in reality of one moment: the moment when a man knows for all time who he is.

He intentado, no se con que fortuna, la redacción de cuentos directos. No me atrevo a afirmar que son sencillos; no hay en la tierra, una sola página, una sola palabra, que lo sea, ya...

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...