Chang Tzu tells us of a persevering man who after three laborious years mastered the art of dragon-slaying. For the rest of his days, he had not a single opportunity to test his skills.
JORGE LUIS BORGESIn all fiction, when a man is faced with alternatives he chooses one at the expense of others.
More Jorge Luis Borges Quotes
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Man’s memory shapes Its own Eden within.
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In Spanish it is very difficult to make things flow, because words are over-long. But in English, you have light words.
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Reality favors symmetry.
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No one is anyone, one single immortal man is all men. Like Cornelius Agrippa, I am god, I am hero, I am philosopher, I am demon and I am world, which is a tedious way of saying that I do not exist.
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While we are asleep in this world, we are awake in another one.
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Death is just infinity closing in.
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It means much to have loved, to have been happy, to have laid my hand on the living Garden, even for a day.
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The mind was dreaming. The world was its dream.
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Many of the characters are fools and they’re always playing tricks on me and treating me badly.
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He was very religious; he believed that he had a secret pact with God which exempted him from doing good in exchange for prayers and piety.
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To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god.
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We forget that we are all dead men conversing with dead men.
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The tango is a direct expression of something that poets have often tried to state in words: the belief that a fight may be a celebration.
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I have preferred to teach my students not English literature but my love for certain authors, or, even better, certain pages, or even better than that, certain lines. One falls in love with a line, then with a page, then with an author. Well, why not? It is a beautiful process.
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A writer should have another lifetime to see if he’s appreciated.
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I cannot walk through the suburbs in the solitude of the night without thinking that the night pleases us because it suppresses idle details, just as our memory does.
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It is clear that there is no classification of the Universe that is not arbitrary and full of conjectures. The reason for this is very simple: we do not know what kind of thing the universe is.
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Each thing implies the universe.
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Soccer is popular because stupidity is popular.
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Poetry remembers that it was an oral art before it was a written art.
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When you come right down to it, opinions are the most superficial things about anyone.
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I never reread what I’ve written. I’m far too afraid to feel ashamed of what I’ve done.
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No one is a poet from eight to twelve and from two to six. Whoever is a poet is one always, and continually assaulted by poetry.
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Don’t talk unless you can improve the silence.
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For me, beauty is a physical sensation, something we feel with our whole body. It is not the result of judgement. We do not arrive at it by way of rules. We either feel beauty or we don’t.
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Loneliness does not worry me; life is difficult enough, putting up with yourself and with your own habits.
JORGE LUIS BORGES