Life & Wisdom Quote by Jorge Luis Borges

Posterity is usually marketed as the one audience you can trust: too distant to be bribed, too wise to be fooled, too “objective” to flatter. Borges punctures that comforting fantasy with a needle so fine you barely feel it until the air is gone. His line turns immortality into just another mirror, and mirrors, in Borges, are never innocent. If contemporary praise is cheap because it’s tangled up in fashion, careerism, and the social itch to belong, then the praise of future readers is only marginally better: delayed applause, not purified judgment.

The intent isn’t anti-art; it’s anti-vanity. Borges is warning writers (and, quietly, readers) against outsourcing meaning to an imagined tribunal of the future. The subtext is a critique of literary ambition that disguises itself as humility. Chasing “lasting significance” can be just ego with a longer timeline. By calling posterity’s flattery “not worth much more,” he admits the seduction of it even as he demotes it: the future is still a crowd, and crowds still clap for reasons that have little to do with truth.

Context matters: Borges lived through avant-gardes hardening into institutions, reputations rising and collapsing on the whims of magazines, movements, and politics. In that churn, “posterity” starts to look less like a steady beacon and more like another labyrinth - one where chance, translation, and gatekeepers decide who becomes timeless. The sting of the aphorism is its moral clarity: write as if praise were irrelevant, because it mostly is.