Have you ever lost yourself in the labyrinthine narrative threads of “Ficciones” or found paradoxical delight in “The Library of Babel“? Then, you're undoubtedly familiar with the mesmerizing wit of Jorge Luis Borges, an Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet, and translator. Borges was famed not only for his complex, intellectual narratives that intertwined fact and fantasy, but also for his eloquent quotes that continue to reverberate in the corridors of literature. Welcome, friends, to our literary journey exploring the universe of “Creative Jorge Luis Borges Quotes.”
Once, when asked about his blindness, Borges reportedly remarked, “I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.” This heartfelt sentiment beautifully encapsulates the man's profound love for literature, highlighting the power of his thought-provoking quotes. Though he lost his sight in his later years, his creativity, paradoxically, bloomed into a universe of metaphysical wonders that continue to engage readers globally. So, buckle up, dear bibliophiles, as we dive into the fantastical world of “Jorge Luis Borges Quotes” that will tickle your intellect, challenge your perceptions, and transform your understanding of reality. Stay tuned, for each quote is a key to an enchanting labyrinth of thought and a testament to Borges' creative genius.
The Gift of Curiosity
1. “I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.”
2. “To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god.”
3. “Mirrors and copulation are abominable, since they both multiply the numbers of men.”
4. “Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire.”
5. “Being with you and not being with you is the only way I have to measure time.”
6. “I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities that I have visited.”
7. “In the order of literature, as in others, there is no act that is not the coronation of an infinite series of causes and the source of an infinite series of effects.”
8. “The original is unfaithful to the translation.”
9. “Music, states of happiness, mythology, faces belabored by time, certain twilights and certain places—all these are trying to tell us something, or have told us something we should not have missed, or are about to tell us something; that is what all stories are about.”
10. “I cannot sleep unless I am surrounded by books.”
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Paradoxes and Mysteries
- “A book is more than a verbal structure or series of verbal structures; it is the dialogue it establishes with its reader and the intonation it imposes upon his voice and the changing and durable images it leaves in his memory.”
- “Every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.”
- “Any life is made up of a single moment, the moment in which a man finds out, once and for all, who he is.”
- “Writing is nothing more than a guided dream.”
- “Reality is not always probable, or likely.”
- “The flattery of posterity is not worth much more than contemporary flattery, which is worth nothing.”
- “I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities that I have visited, all my ancestors.”
- “To die for a religion is easier than to live it absolutely.”
- “A man sets himself the task of portraying the world. Through the years he peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, instruments, stars, horses, and people. Shortly before his death, he discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines traces the image of his face.”
- “What man of us has never felt, walking through the twilight or writing down a date from his past, that he has lost something infinite?”
Time, and Identity
- “The mind was dreaming. The world was its dream.”
- “We accept reality so readily – perhaps because we sense that nothing is real.”
- “A book is not an isolated being: it is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships.”
- “One concept corrupts and confuses the others. I am not speaking of the Evil whose limited sphere is ethics; I am speaking of the infinite.”
- “Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire.”
- “Life itself is a quotation.”
- “In general, every country has the language it deserves.”
- “You have wakened not out of sleep, but into a prior dream, and that dream lies within another, and so on, to infinity, which is the number of grains of sand. The path that you are to take is endless, and you will die before you have truly awakened.”
- “It is known that Whistler when asked how long it took him to paint one of his ‘nocturnes' answered: ‘All of my life.' With the same rigor he could have said that all of the centuries that preceded the moment when he painted were necessary.”
- “In the critic’s vocabulary, the word ‘precursor' is indispensable, but it should be cleansed of all connotation of polemics or rivalry.”
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Borges and His Love for the Written Word
- “Let others pride themselves about how many pages they have written; I'd rather boast about the ones I've read.”
- “I cannot think it unlikely that there is such a total book on some shelf in the universe. I pray to the unknown gods that some man — even a single man, tens of centuries ago — has perused and read this book. If the honor and wisdom and joy of such a reading are not to be my own, then let them be for others. Let heaven exist, though my own place may be in hell.”
- “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.”
- “There is a concept that is the corrupter and destroyer of all others. I speak not of Evil, whose limited empire is that of ethics; I speak of the infinite.”
- “I have known uncertainty: a state unknown to the Greeks.”
- “The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite and perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries.”
- “I have noticed that in spite of religion, the conviction as to one's own immortality is extraordinarily rare. Jews, Christians, and Muslims all profess belief in immortality, but the veneration paid to the first century of life is proof that they truly believe only in those hundred years, for they destine all the rest, throughout eternity, to rewarding or punishing what one did when alive.”
- “Perhaps I am; I will not argue the point.”
- “It is venturesome to think that a coordination of words (philosophies are nothing more than that) can resemble the universe very much.”
- “Of all man's instruments, the most wondrous, no doubt, is the book.”
The Wisdom of Jorge Luis Borges
- “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 be immortal is commonplace; except for man, all creatures are immortal, for they are ignorant of death; what is divine, terrible, incomprehensible, is to know that one is immortal.”
- “I cannot sleep unless I am surrounded by books.”
- “The task of art is to transform what is continuously happening to us, to transform all these things into symbols, into music, into something which can last in man's memory. That is our duty. If we don't fulfill it, we feel unhappy.”
- “The past is indestructible; sooner or later things turn up. One will perhaps discover it in a century.”
- “What matter that it is not reality that writes the lines, but I who imagine them?”
- “I foresee that man will resign himself each day to new abominations, and soon that only bandits and soldiers will be left.”
- “To say the word Romanticism is to say modern art – that is, intimacy, spirituality, color, aspiration towards the infinite, expressed by every means available to the arts.”
- “If I were asked to name the chief event in my life, I should say my father's library.”
- “To err is perhaps human, but it is also human to perceive our errors – and perhaps the nature of this perplexed perception is the matter of this note.”
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