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
aspect subordination universe
A system is nothing more than the subordination of all aspects of the universe to any one of such aspects.
poet inventor
A . . . poet is a discoverer rather than an inventor.
language mathematics made
The mathematical sciences wield their particular language made of digits and signs, no less subtle than any other.
men scope knows
Time broadens the scope of verses and I know of some which, like music, are everything for all men.
ideas people memorization
The people of Tlön are taught that the act of counting modifies the amount counted, turning indefinites into definites. The fact that several persons counting the same quantity come to the same result is for the psychologists of Tlön an example of the association of ideas or of memorization.
yesterday today poverty
The poverty of yesterday was less squalid than the poverty we purchase with our industry today. Fortunes were smaller then as well.
believe thinking resources
A writer—and, I believe, generally all persons—must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource.
fighting men two
The Falklands thing was a fight between two bald men over a comb.
men two chess-pieces
The man who has learned that three plus one are four doesn't have to go through a proof of that assertion with coins, or dice, or chess pieces, or pencils. He knows it, and that's that. He cannot conceive a different sum. There are mathematicians who say that three plus one is a tautology for four, a different way of saying "four" ... If three plus one can be two, or fourteen, then reason is madness.
art play library
Lully's machine, Mill's fear and Lasswitz's chaotic library can be the subject of jokes, but they exaggerate a propensity which is common: making metaphysics and the arts into a kind of play with combinations.
pain suffering poverty
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.
believe science progress
We have stopped believing in progress. What progress that is !
time forks
Time forks perpetually toward innumerable futures.
art temptation genius
Mir Bahadur Ali is, as we have seen, incapable of evading the most vulgar of art's temptations: that of being a genius.