How can we manage to illuminate the pathos of our lives?

— Jorge Luis Borges

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.

— Jorge Luis Borges

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

— Jorge Luis Borges

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

— Jorge Luis Borges

I came to abominate my body, I came to sense that two eyes, two hands, two lungs are as monstrous as two faces.

— Jorge Luis Borges

I cannot combine some charactersdhcmrlchtdjwhich the divine Library has not foreseen and which in one of its secret tongues do not contain a terrible meaning. No one can articulate a syllable which is not filled with tenderness and fear, which is not, in one of these languages, the powerful name of a god. To speak is to fall into tautology.

— Jorge Luis Borges

I cannot lament the loss of a love or a friendship without meditating that one loses only what one really never had.

— Jorge Luis Borges

I cannot sleep unless I am surrounded by books.

— Jorge Luis Borges

I carried out my plan because I felt The Chief had some fear of those of my race, of those uncountable forebears whose culmination lies in me. I wished to prove to him that a yellow man could save his armies.

— Jorge Luis Borges

I do not know whether music knows how to despair over music, or marble over marble, but literature is an art which knows how to prophesize the time in which it might have fallen silent, how to attack its own virtue, and how to fall in love with its own dissolution and court its own end.

— Jorge Luis Borges