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I believe books will never disappear. It is impossible for it to happen. Of all man’s diverse tools, undoubtedly the most astounding are his books… If books were to disappear, history would disappear. So would man.

Jorge Luis Borges

I thought that a man can be an enemy of other men, of the moments of other men, but not of a country: not of fireflies, words, gardens, streams of water, sunsets.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Country Enemy Garden Man Moments Nature Stream
There is an hour of the afternoon when the plain is on the verge of saying something. It never says, or perhaps it says it infinitely, or perhaps we do not understand it, or we understand it and it is untranslatable as music.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Music Time Translation Understand
My undertaking is not difficult, essentially. I should only have to be immortal to carry it out.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Carry Difficult Essential Immortal Myself
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
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 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
To say good-bye is to deny separation; it is to say Today we play at going our own ways, but we’ll see each other tomorrow. Men invented farewells because they somehow knew themselves to be immortal, even while seeing themselves as contingent and ephemeral.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Immortal Invention Known Man Play Separate Way
The mightiest love was granted him Love that does not expect to be loved.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Expectation Himself Love
The future is as irrevocable as an inflexible yesterday.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Future Past
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
The flattery of posterity is not worth much more than contemporary flattery, which is worth nothing.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Flattery Poster Worth
You may win your heart’s desire, but in the end you’re cheated of it by death.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Cheating Death Desire End Heart Win
Death is just infinity closing in.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Close Death Infinite
There’s no need to build a labyrinth when the entire universe is one.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Build Need Oneself Universe
Poetry remembers that it was an oral art before it was a written art.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Art Oral Poetry Remember Writing

I believe books will never disappear. It is impossible for it to happen. Of all man’s diverse tools, undoubtedly the most astounding are his books… If books were to disappear, history would disappear. So would man.

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I believe books will never disappear. It is impossible for it to happen. Of all man’s diverse tools, undoubtedly the most astounding are his books… If books were to disappear, history would disappear. So would man.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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