Jorge Luis Borges Reality Quotations

Many people have thought of me as a thinker, as a philosopher, or even as a mystic. Well the truth is that though I have found reality perplexing enough - in fact, I find it gets more perplexing all the time - I never think of myself as a thinker.

Reality may avoid the obligation to be interesting, but ... hypotheses may not.

Reality is partial to symmetry and slight anachronisms

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. In the hypothesis you have postulated, chance intervenes largely. Here lies a dead rabbi; I should prefer a purely rabbinical explanation; not the imaginary mischances of an imaginary robber.

We accept reality so readily - perhaps because we sense that nothing is real.

Then he reflected that reality does not usually coincide with our anticipation of it; with a logic of his own he inferred that to forsee a circumstantial detail is to prevent its happening. Trusting in this weak magic, he invented, so that they would not happen, the most gruesome details.

The future has no other reality than as present hope, and the past is no more than present memory.

Nowadays, one of the churches of Tlön maintains platonically that such and such a pain, such and such a greenish-yellow colour, such and such a temperature, such and such a sound, etc., make up the only reality there is. All men, in the climactic instant of coitus, are the same man. All men who repeat one line of Shakespeare are William Shakespeare.

Reality is not always probable, or likely. But if you're writing a story, you have to make it as plausible as you can, because if not, the reader's imagination will reject it.

Reality is not always probable, or likely.

Every novel is an ideal plane inserted into the realm of reality.

Reality favors symmetry.