153 quotes
In the order of literature, as in others, there is no act that is not the coronation of an infinite series of causes and the source of an infinite series of effects.
You will reply that reality hasn't the slightest need to be of interest. And I'll answer you that reality may avoid the obligation to be interesting, but that hypotheses may not.
Ficciones (1944)
No one is anyone, one single immortal man is all men. Like Cornelius Agrippa, I am god, I am hero, I am philosopher, I am demon and I am world, which is a tedious way of saying that I do not exist.
The Immortal (1949)
Imprecision is tolerable and verisimilar in literature, because we always tend towards it in life.
Discussion (1932)
I will pause to consider this eternity from which the subsequent ones derive.
There's no need to build a labyrinth when the entire universe is one.
The metaphysicians of Tlön do not seek for the truth or even for verisimilitude, but rather for the astounding.
Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius (1940)
It is venturesome to think that a coordination of words (philosophies are nothing more than that) can resemble the universe very much.
Discussion (1932)
The aesthetic event is something as evident, as immediate, as indefinable as love, the taste of fruit, of water.
The earth we inhabit is an error, an incompetent parody. Mirrors and paternity are abominable because they multiply and affirm it.
It is universally held that the unicorn is a supernatural being and of auspicious omen; so say the odes, the annals, the biographies of worthies, and other texts whose authority is unimpeachable.
Book of Imaginary Beings (1957)
The fact is that poetry is not the books in the library . . . Poetry is the encounter of the reader with the book, the discovery of the book.
Poetry (1977)
The mightiest love was granted him
Love that does not expect to be loved.
The original is unfaithful to the translation.
On William Thomas Beckford's Vathek (1782)
We do not know what the unicorn looks like.
Book of Imaginary Beings (1957)
There are people who barely feel poetry, and they are generally dedicated to teaching it.
Poetry (1977)
I owe the discovery of Uqbar to the conjunction of a mirror and an encyclopedia.
Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius (1940)
The heresies we should fear are those which can be confused with orthodoxy.
His many years had reduced and polished him the way water smooths and polishes a stone or generations of men polish a proverb.
The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite and perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries, with vast air shafts between, surrounded by very low railings.