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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

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.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Age Oneself Poet Poetry
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

Books Existence Fools Ideas Summary Writing
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.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Goodness Prayer Religious Secret
The mind was dreaming. The world was its dream.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Dreams Mindset Perspective World
I saw all the mirrors on earth and none of them reflected me.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Earth Mirror Myself Reflection See
When I wake up, I wake to something worse. It’s the astonishment of being myself.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Astonishment Myself Wake Up Worst
In Spanish it is very difficult to make things flow, because words are over-long. But in English, you have light words.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Difficult Light Spanish Word Yourself
Dictatorships foster oppression, dictatorships foster servitude, dictatorships foster cruelty; more abominable is the fact that they foster idiocy.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Cruelty Dictatorship Fact Leadership Oppression Politics
The original is unfaithful to the translation.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Faith Original Translation
I had always thought of Paradise / In form and image as a library.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Form Heaven Library Myself Paradise Thinking
What a writer wants to do is not what he does.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Himself Writing
Reality may avoid the obligation to be interesting, but hypotheses may not.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Avoid Interest Obligation Reality
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.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Beautiful Feeling Judgement Ourselves Result
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

Image Lost Replacement Shame Time
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

Book Himself Knowledge Man Possibility
I have sometimes suspected that the only thing that holds no mystery is happiness, because it is its own justification.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Happiness Hold Mystery

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.

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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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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