Jorge Luis Borges

"I think when you're talking about very good writers that they are fully conscious of the language they're using."

"Grief is the price we pay for love."

"The moment we stop fighting for each other, that's the moment we stop being human."

"A key is a sacred object to me."

"I might seem to be playing with ideas, but this is not a game to me."

"The only honest sensation is the sensation of not understanding."

"I have never been able to feel that infinity is frightening, but rather that it is inspiring."

"To assume that silence and calmness constitute the ideal happiness is to underestimate the complexity of human nature."

"My enemies and I have one thing in common: we both imagine that I am important."

"Intellectual dishonesty is the only sin which is not forgivable."

"There are some things too important to be told."

"The reader of the present age will come to know him as a figure from the past."

"A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us."

"The web of history is woven from unfinished threads."

"If something is not worth doing, it's worth doing badly."

"In my most daring moments I've believed that literature can save a man, provide him with an identity, awaken him from the slumber of life."

"Hell is other people, paradise is solitude—but man is a social animal."

"I would like to be remembered not for what I have written but for what I have tried to understand."

"The effort must be continuous, without hope, without reward."

"We are all capable of creating worlds inside ourselves."

"An intellectual is a man of letters who has been compromised politically."

"God is not omnipotent in the sense of being capable of everything; he is limited by his own nature."

"I've always known that at some level the search for what is authentic is doomed to fail."

"The concept of ownership is absurd—we are merely custodians of what we possess."

"Every book is a unique window into the world of the author's mind."

"Destiny shapes our ends, but we shape our destiny."

"To be human is to be aware of the vast ocean of ignorance surrounding us."

"Happiness is a rumor that circulates in other people's lives."

"The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there—we do them differently here."

"I have always found that the simplest observations contain the deepest truths."