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

Jorge Luis Borges

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
I think that the reader should enrich what he is reading. He should misunderstand the text; he should change it into something else.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Himself Misunderstanding Reading Thinking
A man sets himself the task of portraying the world. Shortly before he dies he discovers that this patient labyrinth of lines is a drawing of his own face.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Drawing Face Man Portray
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
The visible universe was an illusion or, more precisely, a sophism. Mirrors and fatherhood are abominable because they multiply it and extend it.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Father Mirror Universe Visible
I am not sure of anything, I know nothing. Can you imagine that I don’t even know the date of my own death?
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Date Death Imagination Known Yourself
You have wakened not out of sleep, but into a prior dream, and that dream lies within another, and so on, to infinity, which is the number of grains of sand. The path that you are to take is endless, and you will die before you have truly awakened.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Death End Infinity Sleep Wake Yourself
What I’m really concerned about is reaching one person. And that person may be myself for all I know.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Known Myself Person Reach
Time, which despoils castles, enriches verses.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Literature Patience Power Time
One concept corrupts and confuses the others. I am not speaking of the Evil whose limited sphere is ethics; I am speaking of the infinite.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Confusion Corruption Infinite Limitation
Any life, however long and complicated it may be, actually consists of a single moment — the moment when a man knows forever more who he is.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Feeling Forever Himself Life Man Moments Realize
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

Beautiful Better Fall In Love Literature Preference Student Teaching
In adultery, there is usually tenderness and self-sacrifice; in murder, courage; in profanation and blasphemy, a certain satanic splendour. Judas elected those offences unvisited by any virtues: abuse of confidence and informing.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Adultery Inform Sacrifice Tenderness University
A book is not an isolated being: it is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Book Perspective Relationship
What a writer wants to do is not what he does.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Himself 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

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

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

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