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Quotes from The Garden of Forking Paths — Jorge Luis Borges

1899–1986 Argentina

← All quotes by Jorge Luis Borges

16 quotes

Fame is a form—perhaps the worst form—of incomprehension.

The Garden of Forking Paths (1942)

This network of times which approached one another, forked, broke off, or were unaware of one another for centuries, embraces all possibilities of time.

The Garden of Forking Paths (1942)

A labyrinth of symbols... An invisible labyrinth of time.

The Garden of Forking Paths (1942)

I leave to the various futures (not to all) my garden of forking paths.

The Garden of Forking Paths (1942)

I have known that thing the Greeks knew not – uncertainty.

The Garden of Forking Paths (1942)

Thus fought the heroes, tranquil their admirable hearts, violent their swords, resigned to kill and to die.

The Garden of Forking Paths (1942)

In a riddle whose answer is chess, what is the only prohibited word?

The Garden of Forking Paths (1942)

It seemed incredible to me that day without premonitions or symbols should be the one of my inexorable death.

The Garden of Forking Paths (1942)

I thought of a labyrinth of labyrinths, of one sinuous spreading labyrinth that would encompass the past and the future and in some way involve the stars.

The Garden of Forking Paths (1942)

My undertaking is not difficult, essentially... I should only have to be immortal to carry it out.

The Garden of Forking Paths (1942)

Time forks perpetually toward innumerable futures. In one of them I am your enemy.

The Garden of Forking Paths (1942)

I thought that a man can be an enemy of other men, of the moments of other men, but not of a country: not of fireflies, words, gardens, streams of water, sunsets.

The Garden of Forking Paths (1942)

Writing long books is a laborious and impoverishing act of foolishness: expanding in five hundred pages an idea that could be perfectly explained in a few minutes. A better procedure is to pretend that those books already exist and to offer a summary, a commentary.

The Garden of Forking Paths (1942)

Ts'ui Pe must have said once: I am withdrawing to write a book. And another time: I am withdrawing to construct a labyrinth. Every one imagined two works; to no one did it occur that the book and the maze were one and the same thing.

The Garden of Forking Paths (1942)

In the work of Ts'ui Pên, all possible outcomes occur; each one is the point of departure for other forkings. Sometimes, the paths of this labyrinth converge: for example, you arrive at this house, but in one of the possible pasts you are my enemy, in another, my friend.

The Garden of Forking Paths (1942)

There is no exercise of the intellect which is not, in the final analysis, useless. A philosophical doctrine begins as a plausible description of the universe; with the passage of the years it becomes a mere chapter — if not a paragraph or a name — in the history of philosophy.

The Garden of Forking Paths (1942)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Jorge Luis Borges (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.