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We have stopped believing in progress. What progress that is !

Jorge Luis Borges

Happy are the beloved and the lovers and those who can live without love.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Happiness Live Love Lover
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
When one confesses to an act, one ceases to be an actor in it and becomes its witness, becomes a man that observes and narrates it and no longer the man that performed it.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Actor Confession Man Observation Oneself Performance
The dictionary is based on the hypothesis — obviously an unproven one — that languages are made up of equivalent synonyms.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Dictionary Language Symptoms
The truth is that we live out our lives putting off all that can be put off; perhaps we all know deep down that we are immortal and that sooner or later all men will do and know all things.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Immortal Live Truth Willing
Whoever would undertake some atrocious enterprise should act as if it were already accomplished should impose upon himself a future as irrevocable as the past.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Accomplishment Future Past
Your unforgivable sins do not allow you to see my splendor.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Allow Forgiveness Myself See Sin
Many of the characters are fools and they’re always playing tricks on me and treating me badly.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Character Fools Myself Play Trick
Every man should be capable of all ideas.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Capable Ideas Man
The future has no other reality than as present hope, and the past is no more than present memory.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Future Hope Memories Present Reality
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
Everything touches everything.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Connection One Liner Touch
The worst labyrinth is not that intricate form that can entrap us forever, but a single and precise straight line.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Forever Form Ourselves Worst
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

God Kind Myself Purpose Thinking Unknown
Another school declares that all time has already transpired and that our life is only the crepuscular and no doubt falsified and mutilated memory or reflection of an irrecoverable process.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Doubt Fake Memories Process Reflection School
The word happiness exists in every language; it is plausible the thing itself exists.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Existence Happiness Word
We forget that we are all dead men conversing with dead men.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Conversation Death Forget Man
Time, which despoils castles, enriches verses.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Literature Patience Power Time
It’s a shame that we have to choose between two such second-rate countries as the USSR and the USA.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Choice Country Shame
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
The fact is that poetry is not the books in the library. Poetry is the encounter of the reader with the book, the discovery of the book.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Book Discover Fact Library Poetry
When you come right down to it, opinions are the most superficial things about anyone.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Opinion Right Yourself
The task of art is to transform what is continuously happening to us, to transform all of these things into symbols, into music, into something which can last in man’s memory. That is our duty. If we don’t fulfill it, we feel unhappy.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Art Happiness Man Memories Music Transformation
There is no point in being overwhelmed by the appalling total of human sufferring; such a total does not exist. Neither poverty nor pain is accumulable.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Human Pain Point Suffering
Poetry remembers that it was an oral art before it was a written art.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Art Oral Poetry Remember Writing
Life itself is a quotation.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Life One Liner
Nothing is built on stone; all is built on sand, but we must build as if the sand were stone.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Build Philosophy Stone

We have stopped believing in progress. What progress that is !

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We have stopped believing in progress. What progress that is !

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