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I gazed at every mirror on the planet, not one gave back my reflection.

Jorge Luis Borges

Blindness has not been for me a total misfortune; it should not be seen in a pathetic way. It should be seen as a way of life: one of the styles of living.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Blindness Life Misfortune Oneself See Style Way
It is clear that there is no classification of the Universe that is not arbitrary and full of conjectures. The reason for this is very simple: we do not know what kind of thing the universe is.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Known Reason Simplicity Universe
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
Everything touches everything.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Connection One Liner Touch
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
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
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
I gazed at every mirror on the planet, not one gave back my reflection.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Mirror Myself Planet Reflection
Censorship is the mother of metaphor.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Hide Metaphor Mom
I have always come to life after coming to books.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Book Feeling Life Myself
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
Thus my life is a flight and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to him.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Flight Himself Life Lose
Poets, like the blind, can see in the dark.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Blind Darkness Poet
Creativity is suspended between memory and forgetting.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Creativity Forget Memories
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 think of reading a book as no less an experience than travelling or falling in love.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Book Experience Fall In Love Thinking
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
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
Art is endless like a river flowing, passing, yet remaining.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Art Creativity End River
The mightiest love was granted him Love that does not expect to be loved.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Expectation Himself Love
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.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Existence Identity Memories Problem Solution
I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Imagination Kind Library Myself Paradise
I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities I have visited.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Existence Love Myself Reading Travel Visit Woman Writing
Time can’t be measured in days the way money is measured in pesos and centavos, because all pesos are equal, while every day, perhaps every hour, is different.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Day Different Measurement Money Time
The word happiness exists in every language; it is plausible the thing itself exists.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Existence Happiness Word
My books standing there on the shelf do not know that I have written them.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Book Known Stand Writing
Time is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Consume Fire Myself Time

I gazed at every mirror on the planet, not one gave back my reflection.

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I gazed at every mirror on the planet, not one gave back my reflection.

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