Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges KBE (August 24, 1899 – June 14, 1986), was an Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator, and a key figure in Spanish language literature. His work embraces the "character of unreality in all literature". His best-known books, Ficciones (Fictions) and El Aleph (The Aleph), published in the 1940s, are compilations of short stories interconnected by common themes, including dreams, labyrinths, libraries, mirrors, fictional writers, philosophy, and religion. (Click here for full Wikipedia article)
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Any life, however long and complicated it may be, actually consists of a single moment- the moment when a man knows forever more who he is.
Being conservative is a way of being skeptic.
Being with you and not being with you is the only way I have to measure time.
Democracy is an abuse of statistics.
Dictatorships foster oppression, dictatorships foster servitude, dictatorships foster cruelty; more abominable is the fact that they foster idiocy.
Doubt is one of the names of intelligence.
Every man should be capable of all ideas and I understand that in the future this will be the case.
Heaven and hell seem out of proportion to me: the actions of men do not deserve so much.
How else can one threaten, other than with death? The interesting, the original thing, would be to threaten someone with immortality.
I have committed the worst sin that can be committed. I have not been happy.
I have sometimes suspected that the only thing that holds no mystery is happiness, because it is its own justification.
Let heaven exist, though my own place may be in hell. Let me be tortured and battered and annihilated, but let there be one instant, one creature, wherein thy enormous Library may find its justification.
Life itself is a quotation.
May Heaven exist, even if my place is Hell.
Mirrors and copulation are obscene, for they increase the numbers of mankind.
Myth is at the beginning of literature, and also at its end.
Reality is not always probable, or likely.
The earth we inhabit is an error, an incompetent parody. Mirrors and paternity are abominable because they multiply and affirm it.
The Falklands thing was a fight between two bald men over a comb.
The future is inevitable and precise, but it may not occur. God lurks in the gaps.
The heresies we should fear are those which can be confused with orthodoxy.
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.
There is a concept which corrupts and upsets all others. I refer not to Evil, whose limited realm is that of ethics; I refer to the infinite.
There is no act that is not the coronation of an infinite series of causes and the source of an infinite series of effects.
There is no intellectual exercise which is not ultimately useless.
There is nothing very remarkable about being immortal; with the exception of mankind, all creatures are immortal, for they know nothing of death.
There's no need to build a labyrinth when the entire universe is one.
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.
Time is the substance from which I am made. Time is a river which carries me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger that devours me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire.
To die for a religion is easier than to live it absolutely.
To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god.
What you really value is what you miss, not what you have.
Categories: Jorge Luis Borges, Quotes of the day
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