Jorge Luis Borges
Jorge Luis Borges
Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges KBE; 24 August 1899 – 14 June 1986), was an Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator, and a key figure in Spanish-language literature. His best-known books, Ficcionesand El Aleph, published in the 1940s, are compilations of short stories interconnected by common themes, including dreams, labyrinths, libraries, mirrors, fictional writers, philosophy, and religion...
NationalityArgentinian
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth24 August 1899
philosophy philosophical exercise
There is no exercise of the intellect which is not, in the final analysis, useless. A philosophical doctrine begins as a plausible description of the universe; with the passage of the years it becomes a mere chapter if not a paragraph or a name in the history of philosophy.
simple arbitrary kind
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.
warrior past men
I foresee that man will resign himself each day to more atrocious undertakings; soon there will be no one but warriors and brigands; I give them this counsel: The author of an atrocious undertaking ought to imagine that he has already accomplished it, ought to impose upon himself a future as irrevocable as the past.
mirrors discovery conjunctions
I owe the discovery of Uqbar to the conjunction of a mirror and an encyclopedia.
incredibles should premonition
It seemed incredible to me that day without premonitions or symbols should be the one of my inexorable death .
men actors he-man
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.
men illustration lines
The man who acquires an encyclopedia does not thereby acquire every line, every paragraph, every page, and every illustration; he acquires the possibility of becoming familiar with one and another of those things.
pain reality men
Nowadays, one of the churches of Tlön maintains platonically that such and such a pain, such and such a greenish-yellow colour, such and such a temperature, such and such a sound, etc., make up the only reality there is. All men, in the climactic instant of coitus, are the same man. All men who repeat one line of Shakespeare are William Shakespeare.
eternity pauses
I will pause to consider this eternity from which the subsequent ones derive.
believe people film
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.
dog distance flower
On those remote pages [of 'a certain Chinese encyclopedia'] it is written that animals are divided into (a) those that belong to the Emperor, (b) embalmed ones, (c) those that are trained, (d) suckling pigs, (e) mermaids, (f ) fabulous ones, (g) stray dogs, (h) those that are included in this classification, (i) those that tremble as if they were mad, (j) innumerable ones, (k) those drawn with a very fine camel's hair brush, (l) others, (m) those that have just broken a flower vase, (n) those that resemble flies from a distance.
literature
One literature differs from another, either before or after it, not so much because of the text as for the manner in which it is read.
important way literature
The things that are said in literature are always the same. What is important is the way they are said.
mystery sometimes justification
I have sometimes suspected that the only thing that holds no mystery is happiness, because it is its own justification.