Jorge Luis Borges

"To think is to forget differences, to generalize, to abstract."

"A book is more than a verbal structure. It is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships."

"Blindness was a way of being free, a way of being alone."

"The taste of the apple is the same whether the apple is thrown or eaten."

"One should as a rule respect public opinion in so far as is necessary to avoid starvation and to obtain the things that allow one to live."

"My task is not to narrate life; it is to narrate the distance from myself to life."

"Poetry is not a matter of inspiration but of craft and patience."

"If I could live again my life, in the next one I would try to make more mistakes."

"We are our memory, we are that chimerical museum of shifting shapes."

"That fate made friends with my misfortune."

"The Minotaur (mythology aside) is the man who is always inside the labyrinth."

"Perfection is a long patience."

"I have postulated a categorical principle: literature is not exhausted by morality."

"Time is the substance I am made of."

"The fear of God is the origin of wisdom, the fear of life is the origin of destruction."

"Mysticism can be defined as the attempt to reach a certain experience of the infinite."

"Art is a form of justice."

"Every authentic poem is composed of many layers of meaning that can be stripped away only by a process of rereading."

"There is nothing like the real thing, but sometimes a copy is all we need."

"I have always been more interested in the future than in the past."

"The universe tends not to be intricate or subtle. It tends to be brutal and direct."

"To deny is also to affirm."

"I am a reader and a writer; I am an Argentine and a man."

"A word is the sum of all the feelings it awakens in us."

"What I have tried to express is the relationship between the soul and eternal things."

"We live for ourselves and for others, but the self is the eternal center."

"In my case, blindness was not a deprivation. It was a gift."

"The present is always vague and indistinct."

"No pleasure is comparable to standing upon the vantage-ground of truth."

"A man is a very small thing, and the night is very large and full of wonders."