Personally, I am a hedonistic reader; I have never read a book merely because it was ancient. I read books for the aesthetic emotions they offer me, and I ignore the commentaries and criticism.
JORGE LUIS BORGESAll that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.
More Jorge Luis Borges Quotes
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He consorted with prostitutes and poets and with persons even worse.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
The man who acquires an encyclopedia does not thereby acquire every line, every paragraph, every page, and every illustration; he acquires the possibility of becoming familiar with one and another of those things.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
Soccer is popular because stupidity is popular.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
How can we manage to illuminate the pathos of our lives?
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
Man’s memory shapes Its own Eden within.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
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 BORGES -
I believe that in time we will have reached the point where we will deserve to be free of government.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
You can’t measure time by days, the way you measure money by dollars and cents, because dollars are all the same while every day is different and maybe every hour as well.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
My books standing there on the shelf do not know that I have written them.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
Writing long books is a laborious and impoverishing act of foolishness: expanding in five hundred pages an idea that could be perfectly explained in a few minutes. A better procedure is to pretend that those books already exist and to offer a summary, a commentary.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
We have a very precise image – an image at times shameless – of what we have lost, but we are ignorant of what may follow or replace it.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
The sea is an idiom I cannot decipher.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
The future is inevitable and precise, but it may not occur. God lurks in the gaps.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
Then I reflect that all things happen, happen to one, precisely now. Century follows century, and things happen only in the present. There are countless men in the air, on land and at sea, and all that really happens happens to me.
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I think most people are more important than their opinions.
JORGE LUIS BORGES