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How can we manage to illuminate the pathos of our lives?

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
Lives
Illuminate
Pathos
Manage

More quotes by Jorge Luis Borges

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The visible universe was an illusion or, more precisely, a sophism. Mirrors and fatherhood are abominable because they multiply it and extend it.
Jorge Luis Borges
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Heaven and hell seem out of proportion to me: the actions of men do not deserve so much.
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Music, feelings of happiness, mythology, faces worn by time, certain twilights and certain places, want to tell us something, or they told us something that we should not have missed, or they are about to tell us something this imminence of a revelation that is not produced is, perhaps, the esthetic event.
Jorge Luis Borges
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I saw a sunset in Queretaro that seemed to reflect the color of a rose in Bengal.
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There is no point in being overwhelmed by the appalling total of human sufferring such a total does not exist. Neither poverty nor pain is accumulable.
Jorge Luis Borges
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The task of art is to transform what is continuously happening to us, to transform all of 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.
Jorge Luis Borges
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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
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The web of time - the strands of which approach one another, bifurcate, intersect, or ignore each other through the centuries - embraces every possibility. We do not exist in most of them. In some you exist and not I, while in others I do, and you do not, and in yet others both of us exist.
Jorge Luis Borges
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The execution was set for the 29th of March, at nine in the morning. This delay was due to a desire on the part of the authorities to act slowly and impersonally, in the manner of planets or vegetables.
Jorge Luis Borges
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The mathematical sciences wield their particular language made of digits and signs, no less subtle than any other.
Jorge Luis Borges
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Yo, que me figuraba el Paraíso / Bajo la especie de una biblioteca. I have always imagined Paradise as a kind of library.
Jorge Luis Borges
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I suppose identity depends on memory. And if my memory is blotted out, then I wonder if I exist - I mean, if I am the same person. Of course, I don't have to solve that problem. It's up to God, if any.
Jorge Luis Borges
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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.
Jorge Luis Borges
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We forget that we are all dead men conversing with dead men.
Jorge Luis Borges
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Happy are the beloved and the lovers and those who can live without love.
Jorge Luis Borges
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To arrange a library is to practice in a quiet and modest way the art of criticism.
Jorge Luis Borges
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It seemed incredible to me that day without premonitions or symbols should be the one of my inexorable death .
Jorge Luis Borges
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I hardly know what I'm going to write - an article, a story, a poem in free verse - or in some regular form. I only know that when I have the first sentence. And when the first sentence makes a kind of pattern, then I find out the kind of rhythm I'm looking for.
Jorge Luis Borges
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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.
Jorge Luis Borges
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I...have always known that my destiny was, above all, a literary destiny — that bad things and some good things would happen to me, but that, in the long run, all of it would be converted into words. Particularly the bad things, since happiness does not need to be transformed: happiness is its own end.
Jorge Luis Borges