Life & Wisdom Quote by Jorge Luis Borges

Writers are ruthless accountants with everyone else’s ledger, then they beg to be treated like venture capitalists funding their own. Borges nails the asymmetry with a surgeon’s calm: the artist judges peers by the hard currency of finished work, yet wants to be appraised by the shimmering promissory notes of intention. It’s funny in a dry, devastating way because it’s so recognizably true, and because it exposes a moral dodge dressed up as sensitivity.

The sentence hinges on that pivot from “accomplished” to “envisaged or planned.” Accomplishment is public, legible, verifiable. Envisaging is private, messy, and conveniently unverifiable. Borges is describing not just ego but a coping mechanism: the gap between what a writer wants to make and what they manage to make is often the defining pain of the job. If you’re judged by the pages on the table, you’re vulnerable; if you’re judged by the masterpiece in your head, you remain invincible.

Context matters: Borges, the great architect of imagined libraries, false bibliographies, and infinite drafts, built an entire aesthetic around the power of the unrealized and the hypothetical. Late in life, with blindness and a career spent turning limitations into form, he understood that “planning” can be both alibi and genuine artistic territory. The subtext is double-edged: a critique of writers’ special pleading, and a sly defense of literature as an art where the imagined work exerts real pressure on the finished one. We don’t only write what we did; we write toward what we can almost see.