Jorge Luis Borges Quotes

He is dead who called me into being, and when I shall be no more the very remembrance of us both will speedily vanish.

Man passes away; his name perishes from record and recollection; his history is as a tale that is told, and his very monument becomes a ruin.

Don't cling to fame. You're just borrowing it. It's like money. You're going to die, and somebody else is going to get it.

Time stays, we go.

I see that all of us who live are nothing but images or insubstantial shadow.

Things were here before you and will be here after you're gone. The geographic features, especially, give you a sense of your own place in the world and in time.

When I die, and people realize that I will not be resurrected in three days, they will forget me. That is the way it should be.

I don't want to own anything that won't fit into my coffin.

We just want to be remembered before something is set in stone.

Words have a longevity that I do not have.

We all go to our grave thinking that we will never be forgotten, and we are forgotten ten minutes later.

Tomorrow I too – this feeling and thinking soul, the universe I am to myself – yes, tomorrow I too will be someone who no longer walks these streets, someone others will evoke with a vague: 'I wonder what's become of him?” And everything I do, everything I feel, everything I experience, will be just one less passer-by on the daily streets of some city or other.

Someday no one will remember that she ever existed, I wrote in my notebook, and then, or that I did. Because memories fall apart, too. And then you're left with nothing, left not even with a ghost but with its shadow. In the beginning, she had haunted me, haunted my dreams, but even now, just weeks later, she was slipping away, falling apart in my memory and everyone else's, dying again.

If we one day cease to exist, what will be remarkable is that we were ever here at all.

It's true that the biggest value of life is that it's going to stop. I was thinking when I was in New York the last time that all that we see that has importance is man-made. It isn't nature-made. And when I was looking through the window, looking at New York, I was so moved by humanity's desire for immortality-because that's what it is.

We are tiny flames, Helikaon, and we flicker alone in the great dark for no more than a heartbeat. When we strive for wealth, glory and fame, it is meaningless. The nations we fight for will one day cease to be. Even the mountains we gaze upon will crumble to dust. To truly live we must yearn for that which does not die.

Stories live forever. Storytellers don't.

Like a wind crying endlessly through the universe, Time carries away the names and the deeds of conquerors and commoners alike. And all that we were, all that remains, is in the memories of those who cared we came this way for a brief moment.

One day I'll be old, dead, forgotten. And at this very moment, while I'm sitting here thinking these things, a man in a dingy hotel room is thinking, "I will always be here."

What will die with me when I die, what pathetic or fragile form will the world lose?

Nothing can be sadder or more profound than to see a thousand things for the first and last time. To journey is to be born and die each minute...All the elements of life are in constant flight from us, with darkness and clarity intermingled, the vision and the eclipse; we look and hasten, reaching out our hands to clutch; every happening is a bend in the road...and suddenly we have grown old. We have a sense of shock and gathering darkness; ahead is a black doorway; the life that bore us is a flagging horse, and a veiled stranger is waiting in the shadows to unharness us.

There is something miraculous in the way the years wash away your evidence, first you, then your friends and family, then the descendants who remember your face, until you aren’t even a memory, you’re only carbon, no greater than your atoms, and time will divide them as well.

We're all just songs in the end. If we are lucky.

Some day soon, perhaps in forty years, there will be no one alive who has ever known me. That's when I will be truly dead - when I exist in no one's memory. I thought a lot about how someone very old is the last living individual to have known some person or cluster of people. When that person dies, the whole cluster dies,too, vanishes from the living memory. I wonder who that person will be for me. Whose death will make me truly dead?

What a lesson, indeed, is all history and all life to the folly and fruitlessness of pride! The Egyptian kings had their embalmed bodies preserved in massive pyramids, to obtain an earthly immortality. In the seventeenth century they were sold as quack medicines, and now they are burnt for fuel! The Egyptian mummies, which Cambyses or time hath spared, avarice now consumeth. Mummy is become merchandise.