Jorge Luis Borges Mirrors Quotations

We are our memory, we are that chimerical museum of shifting shapes, that pile of broken mirrors.

It only takes two facing mirrors to build a labyrinth.

I owe the discovery of Uqbar to the conjunction of a mirror and an encyclopedia.

The earth we inhabit is an error, an incompetent parody. Mirrors and paternity are abominable because they multiply and affirm it.

The visible universe was an illusion or, more precisely, a sophism. Mirrors and fatherhood are abominable because they multiply it and extend it.

Two aesthetics exist: the passive aesthetic of mirrors and the active aesthetic of prisms. Guided by the former, art turns into a copy of the environment's objectivity or the individual's psychic history. Guided by the latter, art is redeemed, makes the world into its instrument, and forges, beyond spatial and temporal prisons, a personal vision.

I saw all the mirrors on earth and none of them reflected me.

I gazed at every mirror on the planet, not one gave back my reflection.