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Reading is an activity subsequent to writing: more resigned, more civil, more intellectual.
Jorge Luis Borges
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Jorge Luis Borges
Age: 86 †
Born: 1899
Born: August 24
Died: 1986
Died: March 26
Librarian
Literary Critic
Poet
Screenwriter
Translator
Writer
Buenos Ayres
Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges
Chorche Louis Borches
Jorge Luis Borges Acevedo
Horhe Luis Borhes
J. L. Borges
H. Bustos Domecq
Khorkhe Luyis Borkhes
Borges
Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo
Hippie
Civil
Activity
Intellectual
Reading
Writing
Intellectualism
Subsequent
Resigned
More quotes by Jorge Luis Borges
No one is anyone, one single immortal man is all men. Like Cornelius Agrippa, I am god, I am hero, I am philosopher, I am demon and I am world, which is a tedious way of saying that I do not exist.
Jorge Luis Borges
I gazed at every mirror on the planet, not one gave back my reflection.
Jorge Luis Borges
Time is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire.
Jorge Luis Borges
The dictionary is based on the hypothesis -- obviously an unproven one -- that languages are made up of equivalent synonyms.
Jorge Luis Borges
How can we manage to illuminate the pathos of our lives?
Jorge Luis Borges
To die for a religion is easier than to live it absolutely.
Jorge Luis Borges
I do not write for a select minority, which means nothing to me, nor for that adulated platonic entity known as ‘The Masses’. Both abstractions, so dear to the demagogue, I disbelieve in. I write for myself and for my friends, and I write to ease the passing of time.
Jorge Luis Borges
Chang Tzu tells us of a persevering man who after three laborious years mastered the art of dragon-slaying. For the rest of his days, he had not a single opportunity to test his skills.
Jorge Luis Borges
Reality is not always probable, or likely.
Jorge Luis Borges
The future has no other reality than as present hope, and the past is no more than present memory.
Jorge Luis Borges
I suppose every poet has his own private mythology. Maybe he's unaware of it. People tell me that I have evolved a private mythology of tigers, of blades, of labyrinths, and Im unaware of the fact this is so. My readers are finding it all the time. But I think perhaps that is the duty of poet.
Jorge Luis Borges
When one confesses to an act, one ceases to be an actor in it and becomes its witness, becomes a man that observes and narrates it and no longer the man that performed it.
Jorge Luis Borges
Whatever one man does, it is as if all men did it. For that reason, it is not unfair that one disobedience in a garden should contaminate all humanity for that reason it is not unjust that the crucifixion of a single Jew should be sufficient to save it.
Jorge Luis Borges
My friends tell me that I am an intruder, that I don't really write when I attempt poetry. But those of my friends who write in prose say that I'm no writer when I attempt prose. So really I don't know what to do, I'm in a quandary.
Jorge Luis Borges
I know of one semibarbarous zone whose librarians repudiate the vain and superstitious habit of trying to find sense in books, equating such a quest with attempting to find meaning in dreams or in the chaotic lines on the palms of one's hand.
Jorge Luis Borges
I can’t talk about my books. I have written them and tried to forget them. I have written once, and readers have read me many times, no? I try to think of what I wrote, it’s very unhealthy to think about the past, the case of elegies is very sad, as much as the case of complaints.
Jorge Luis Borges
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.
Jorge Luis Borges
A book is a physical object in a world of physical objects. It is a set of dead symbols. And then the right reader comes along, and the words—or rather the poetry behind the words, for the words themselves are mere symbols—spring to life, and we have a resurrection of the word.
Jorge Luis Borges
Time is the tiger that devours me, but I am that tiger.
Jorge Luis Borges
We are as ignorant of the meaning of the dragon as we are of the meaning of the universe.
Jorge Luis Borges