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 BORGESThe tango is a direct expression of something that poets have often tried to state in words: the belief that a fight may be a celebration.
More Jorge Luis Borges Quotes
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The word happiness exists in every language; it is plausible the thing itself exists.
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We accept reality so readily – perhaps because we sense that nothing is real.
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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 -
Dictatorships foster oppression, dictatorships foster servitude, dictatorships foster cruelty; more abominable is the fact that they foster idiocy.
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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.
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Reality favors symmetry.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
The flattery of posterity is not worth much more than contemporary flattery, which is worth nothing.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
The future is inevitable and precise, but it may not occur. God lurks in the gaps.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
Heaven and hell seem out of proportion to me: the actions of men do not deserve so much.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
I had always thought of Paradise / In form and image as a library.
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To die for a religion is easier than to live it absolutely.
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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 -
Reality may avoid the obligation to be interesting, but hypotheses may not.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
Life itself is a quotation.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
The mind was dreaming. The world was its dream.
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The future is as irrevocable as an inflexible yesterday.
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Each thing implies the universe.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
A poet is a discoverer rather than an inventor.
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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 -
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 -
In our dreams (writes Coleridge) images represent the sensations we think they cause; we do not feel horror because we are threatened by a sphinx; we dream of a sphinx in order to explain the horror we feel.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
There’s no need to build a labyrinth when the entire universe is one.
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
How can we manage to illuminate the pathos of our lives?
JORGE LUIS BORGES -
While we are asleep in this world, we are awake in another one.
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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 -
We are our memory, we are that chimerical museum of shifting shapes, that pile of broken mirrors.
JORGE LUIS BORGES