All 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.
JORGE LUIS BORGESChang 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.
More Jorge Luis Borges Quotes
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When writers die they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarnation.
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To die for a religion is easier than to live it absolutely.
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I would rather like to think of God as being a kind of adventurer – even as Wells thought about him – or perhaps as something within us making for some unknown purpose.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
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.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
There’s no need to build a labyrinth when the entire universe is one.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
Thus my life is a flight and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to him.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
Only in the present do things happen.
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Reality favors symmetry.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
I think of reading a book as no less an experience than travelling or falling in love.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
Every man should be capable of all ideas.
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The central fact of my life has been the existence of words and the possibility of weaving those words into poetry.
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I suppose identity depends on memory. And if my memory is blotted out, then I wonder if I exist – I mean, if I am the same person. Of course, I don’t have to solve that problem. It’s up to God, if any.
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Dictatorships foster oppression, dictatorships foster servitude, dictatorships foster cruelty; more abominable is the fact that they foster idiocy.
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In our dreams (writes Coleridge) images represent the sensations we think they cause; we do not feel horror because we are threatened by a sphinx; we dream of a sphinx in order to explain the horror we feel.
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I cannot sleep unless I am surrounded by books.
JORGE LUIS BORGES