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Jorge Luis Borges (1899 – 1986)


Argentine writer who is considered one of the foremost literary figures of the 20th century.
Jorge Luis Borges
I saw the delicate bone structure of a hand; I saw the survivors of a battle sending out post cards. . . I saw the oblique shadow of some ferns on the floor of a hot-house; I saw tigers, emboli, bison, ground swells and armies; I saw all the ants in the world.
Borges quotes
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.
Borges
Arrasado el jardín, profanados los cálices y las aras, entraron a caballo los hunos en la biblioteca monástica y rompieron los libros incomprensibles y los vituperaron y los quemaron, acaso temerosos de que las letras encubrieran blasfemias contra su dios, que era una cimitarra de hierro.




Borges Jorge Luis quotes
Hay un concepto que es el corruptor y el desatinador de los otros. No hablo del mal cuyo limitado imperio es la ética; hablo del infinito.
Borges Jorge Luis
The central problem of novel-writing is causality.
Jorge Luis Borges quotes
Like every writer, he measured the virtues of other writers by their performance, and asked that they measure him by what he conjectured or planned.
Jorge Luis Borges
Coleridge observes that all men are born Aristotelians or Platonists. The latter feel that classes, orders, and genres are realities; the former, that they are generalizations. For the latter, language is nothing but an approximative set of symbols; for the former, it is the map of the universe. The Platonist knows that the universe is somehow a cosmos, an order; that order, for the Aristotelian, can be an error or a fiction of our partial knowledge. Across the latitudes and the epochs, the two immortal antagonists change their name and language: one is Parmenides, Plato, Spinoza, Kant, Francis Bradley; the other, Heraclitus, Aristotle, Locke, Hume, William James.
Borges Jorge Luis quotes
One thinker no less brilliant than the heresiarch himself, but in the orthodox tradition, advanced a most daring hypothesis. This felicitous supposition declared that there is only one Individual, and that this indivisible Individual is every one of the separate beings in the universe, and that these beings are the instruments and masks of divinity itself.
Borges
The aesthetic event is something as evident, as immediate, as indefinable as love, the taste of fruit, of water. We feel poetry as we feel the closeness of a woman, or as we feel a mountain or a bay. If we feel it immediately, why dilute it with other words, which no doubt will be weaker than our feelings?
Borges Jorge Luis
"Well, [Lorca had] a gift for gab. For example, he makes striking metaphors, but I think he makes striking metaphors for him, because I think that his world was mostly verbal. I think that he was fond of playing words against each other, the contrast of words, but I wonder if he knew what he was doing."
Jorge Luis Borges
The future is inevitable and precise, but it may not occur. God lurks in the gaps.




Jorge Luis Borges quotes
Years of solitude had taught him that, in one's memory, all days tend to be the same, but that there is not a day, not even in jail or in the hospital, which does not bring surprises, which is not a translucent network of minimal surprises.
Jorge Luis Borges
Wilde was not a great poet nor a consummate prose writer. He was a very astute Irishman who encompassed in epigrams an esthetic credo which others before him scattered in the space of long pages. He was an enfant terrible.
Borges quotes
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.
Borges Jorge Luis
A labyrinth of symbols... An invisible labyrinth of time.
Borges Jorge Luis quotes
Cabe ir más lejos; cabe sospechar que no hay universo en el sentido orgánico, unificador, que tiene esa ambiciosa palabra. Si lo hay, falta conjeturar su propósito; falta conjeturar las palabras, las definiciones, las etimologías, las sinonimias, del secreto diccionario de Dios.
Jorge Luis Borges
The geometry of Tlön comprises two somewhat different disciplines: the visual and the tactile. The latter corresponds to our own geometry and is subordinated to the first.
Jorge Luis Borges quotes
What one man does is something done, in some measure, by all men. For that reason a disobedience committed in a garden contaminates the human race; for that reason it is not unjust that the crucifixion of a single Jew suffices to save it.
Jorge Luis Borges
En mi juventud probé la mescalina y la cocaína pero enseguida me pasé a los pastillas de menta que me parecieron más estimulantes. Si las drogas producen el mismo efecto que el alcohol, no me interesan. Un borracho es evidentemente ridículo. He estado borracho algunas veces y lo recuerdo como una experiencia muy desagradable para los demás y para mí.
Borges Jorge Luis
In life, he suffered from a sense of unreality, as do many Englishmen.


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