[The Cabalists] thought that a work dictated by the Holy Spirit was an absolute text: in other words, a text in which the collaboration of chance was calculable as zero. This portentous premise of a book impenetrable to contingency, of a book which is a mechanism of infinite purposes, moved them to dispute the scriptural words, add up the numerical value of the letters, consider their form, observe the small letters and the capitals, seek acrostics and anagrams, and perform other exegetical rigors which it is not difficult to ridicule. Their excuse is that nothing can be contingent in the work of an infinite mind. Leon Bloy postulates this hieroglyphical character, this character of a divine writing this character of a divine mystery, of an angelic cryptography at all moments and in all beings on earth.

Jorge Luis Borges

Once the idealist argument is accepted, I understand that it is possible—even inevitable —to go even further. . . . The Cartesian "I think, therefore I am" is thus invalidated: to say I think is to postulate the I, and is a petito principii. In the eighteenth century, Lichtenberg proposed that in place of I think, we should say, impersonally it thinks, just as one could say it thunders or it flashes (lightning).

Jorge Luis Borges, "A New Refutation of Time"

The greatest sorcerer [writes Novalis memorably] would be the one who bewitched himself to the point of taking his own phantasmagorias for autonomous apparitions. Would not this be true of us?

I believe that it is. We (the undivided divinity that operates within us) have dreamed the world. We have dreamed it strong, mysterious, visible, ubiquitous in space and secure in time, but we have allowed tenuous, eternal interstices of injustice in its structure so we may know it is false.

Jorge Luis Borges, "Avatars of the Tortoise"

The first texts of Buddhism relate that the Buddha, under the fig tree, perceived by intuition the infinite concatenations of all the causes and effects of the universe, the past and future incarnations of each being. The last texts, written centuries later, reason that nothing is real and that all knowledge is fictitious and that if there were as many Ganges Rivers as there are grains of sand in the Ganges and again as many Ganges Rivers as grains of sand in those new Ganges Rivers, the number of grains would be smaller than the number of things not known by the Buddha.

Jorge Luis Borges, "From Someone to Nobody"

Why does it make us uneasy to know that the map is within the map and the thousand and one nights are within the book of A Thousand and One Nights? Why does it disquiet us to know that Don Quixote is a reader of the Quixote, and Hamlet is a spectator of Hamlet? I believe I have found the answer: those inversions suggest that if the characters in a story can be readers or spectators, then we, their readers or spectators, can be fictitious. In 1833 Carlyle observed that universal history is an infinite sacred book that all men write and read and try to understand, and in which they too are written.

Jorge Luis Borges, "Partial Enchantments of the Quixote"

In time, only those things last

which have not been in time.

Jorge Luis Borges, "Quince Monedas"

They say Ulysses, wearied of wonders,

wept with love on seeing Ithaca,

humble and green. Art is that Ithaca,

a green eternity, not wonders.

Art is endless, like a river flowing,

passing yet remaining, a mirror to the same

inconstant Heraclitus, who is the same

and yet another, like the river flowing.

Jorge Luis Borges, "The Art of Poetry"

Around 1930 Paul Valery wrote that the history of literature should not be the history of the authors and the accidents of the careers of their works, but rather the history of the Spirit as the producer or consumer of literature. He added that such a history could be written without the mention of a single writer.

Jorge Luis Borges, "The Flower of Coleridge"

The greatest sorcerer [writes Novalis memorably] would be the one who bewitched himself to the point of taking his own phantasmagorias for autonomous apparitions. Would not this be true of us?

I believe that it is. We (the undivided divinity that operates within us) have dreamed the world. We have dreamed it strong, mysterious, visible, ubiquitous in space and secure in time; but we have allowed tenuous, eternal interstices of injustice in its structure so we may know that it is false.

Jorge Luis Borges, "The Partial Enchantments of the Quixote"

The odd thing is that the Secret has not been lost long ago; despite the vicissitudes of the world, despite wars and exoduses, it extends, in its tremendous fashion, to all the faithful. One commentator has not hesitated to assert that it is already instinctive.

Jorge Luis Borges, "The Sect of the Phoenix"