"It may be that universal history is the history of the different intonations given a handful of metaphors."
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Quote collection
Jorge Luis Borges quotes (page 10 of 17)
334 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"What will die with me the day I die? What pathetic or frail image will be lost to the world? The voice of Macedonio Fernandez, the image of a bay horse in a vacant lot on the corner of Sarrano and Charcas, a bar of sulfur in the drawer of a mahogany desk?"
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"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."
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"In the critics' vocabulary, the work 'precursor' is indispensable, but it should be cleansed of all connotations of polemics or rivalry."
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"He constructed a vast labyrinthine of periods, made impassable by the piling-up of clauses upon clauses-clauses in which oversight and bad grammar seemed manifestations of disdain."
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"I have known uncertainty: a state unknown to the Greeks."
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"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."
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"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."
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"The universe is composed of an indefinite and perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries."
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"It means much to have loved, to have been happy, to have laid my hand on the living Garden, even for a day."
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"Israelites, Christians and Muslims profess immortality, but the veneration they render this world proves they believe only in it, since they destine all other worlds, in infinite number, to be its reward or punishment."
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"Everything touches everything."
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"He was very religious; he believed that he had a secret pact with God which exempted him from doing good in exchange for prayers and piety."
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"Many of the characters are fools and they're always playing tricks on me and treating me badly."
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"The word happiness exists in every language; it is plausible the thing itself exists."
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"It's a shame that we have to choose between two such second-rate countries as the USSR and the USA."
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"I confess that I have not cleared a path through all seven hundred pages, I confess to having examined only bits and pieces, and yet I know what it is, with that bold and legitimate certainty with which we assert our knowledge of a city, without ever having been rewarded with the intimacy of all the many streets it includes."
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"Whoever would undertake some atrocious enterprise should act as if it were already accomplished should impose upon himself a future as irrevocable as the past."
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"In Spanish it is very difficult to make things flow, because words are over-long. But in English, you have light words."
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"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."
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