Jorge Luis Borges Quotes - Page 2

It's a shame that we have to choose between two such second-rate countries as the USSR and the USA.

The thought came over me that never would one full and absolute moment, containing all the others, justify my life, that all of my instants would be provisional phases, annihilators of the past turned to face the future, and that beyond the episodic, the present, the circumstantial, we were nobody.

One of the schools in Tlön has reached the point of denying time. It reasons that the present is undefined, that the future has no other reality than as present hope, that the past is no more than present memory.

There are those who seek the love of a woman to forget her, to not think about her.

Reading . . . is an activity subsequent to writing: more resigned, more civil, more intellectual.

Yo, que me figuraba el Paraíso bajo la especie de una biblioteca.

We are as ignorant of the meaning of the dragon as we are of the meaning of the universe.

They seek neither truth nor likelihood; they seek astonishment. They think metaphysics is a branch of the literature of fantasy

Reality is not always probable, or likely.

Another school declares that all time has already transpired and that our life is only the crepuscular and no doubt falsified and mutilated memory or reflection of an irrecoverable process.

I suspected once that any human life, however intricate and full it might be, consisted in reality of one moment: the moment when a man knows for all time who he is.

Russel /.../ antar att planeten har blivit skapad för några minuter sedan, >utrustad< med en mänsklighet som >minns< ett illusoriskt förflutet.

En av lärorna på Tlön går så långt att den förnekar tiden: den tänker sig att nuet är oändligt, att framtiden inte är verklig annat än som en förväntan i nuet, att det förflutna inte är verkligt annat än som ett minne i nuet.

I reread these negative remarks and realize that I do not know whether music can despair of music or marble of marble. I do know that literature is an art that can foresee the time when it will be silenced, an art that can become inflamed with its own virtue, fall in love with its own decline, and court its own demise.

Art always opts for the individual, the concrete; art is not Platonic.

It must be that I am not made to be a dead man, but these places and this discussion seem like a dream, and not a dream dreamed by me but by someone else still to be born.

The story of two dreams is a coincidence, a line drawn by chance, like the shapes of lions or horses that are sometimes formed by clouds.

There is an hour of the afternoon when the plain is on the verge of saying something. It never says, or perhaps it says it infinitely, or perhaps we do not understand it, or we understand it and it is untranslatable as music.

We have a very precise image - an image at times shameless - of what we have lost, but we are ignorant of what may follow or replace it.

The truth is that we all live by leaving behind; no doubt we all profoundly know that we are immortal and that sooner or later every man will do all things and know everything.