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The earth we inhabit is an error, an incompetent parody. Mirrors and paternity are abominable because they multiply and affirm it.

Jorge Luis Borges

Let others pride themselves about how many pages they have written; I’d rather boast about the ones I’ve read.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Oneself Page Pride Reading Writing
When I write, I do it urged by an intimate necessity. I don’t have in mind an exclusive public, or a public of multitudes, I don’t think in either thing. I think about expressing what I want to say. I try to do it in the simplest way possible.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Expression Intimate Myself Necessary Possible Simplicity Writing
A writer’s work is the product of laziness.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Lazy Poet Work Writing
You may win your heart’s desire, but in the end you’re cheated of it by death.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Cheating Death Desire End Heart Win
It means much to have loved, to have been happy, to have laid my hand on the living Garden, even for a day.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Day Garden Hands Live Love
Your unforgivable sins do not allow you to see my splendor.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Allow Forgiveness Myself See Sin
The flattery of posterity is not worth much more than contemporary flattery, which is worth nothing.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Flattery Poster Worth
How can we manage to illuminate the pathos of our lives?
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Illumination Live Management Ourselves
The heresies we should fear are those which can be confused with orthodoxy.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Confusion Orthodox
Israelites, Christians and Muslims profess immortality, but the veneration they render this world proves they believe only in it, since they destine all other worlds, in infinite number, to be its reward or punishment.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Believe Destiny Punishment Religion Reward Secularism World
We are our memory, we are that chimerical museum of shifting shapes, that pile of broken mirrors.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Memories Mirror Museum Shape
When you come right down to it, opinions are the most superficial things about anyone.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Opinion Right Yourself
Art is very mysterious. I wonder if you can really do any damage to art. I think that when we’re writing, something comes through or should come through, in spite of our theories. So theories are not really important.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Art Damage Important Mystery Theory Writing Yourself
Films are even stranger, for what we are seeing are not disguised people but photographs of disguised people, and yet we believe them while the film is being shown.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Believe Disguise Movie People Photograph Stranger
I do not write for a select minority, which means nothing to me, nor for that adulated platonic entity known as ‘The Masses’. Both abstractions, so dear to the demagogue, I disbelieve in. I write for myself and for my friends, and I write to ease the passing of time.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Ease Friendship Minority Myself Time Writing
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.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Existence Man Present Reflection Time Yourself

The earth we inhabit is an error, an incompetent parody. Mirrors and paternity are abominable because they multiply and affirm it.

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The earth we inhabit is an error, an incompetent parody. Mirrors and paternity are abominable because they multiply and affirm it.

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