Quote

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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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
Feel
Happening
Continuously
Feels
Memory
Fulfill
Something
Duty
Transform
Things
Memories
Symbols
Men
Lasts
Task
Last
Unhappy
Art
Happenings
Music
Tasks

More quotes by Jorge Luis Borges

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In general, every country has the language it deserves.
Jorge Luis Borges
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The future has no other reality than as present hope, and the past is no more than present memory.
Jorge Luis Borges
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I think that the reader should enrich what he is reading. He should misunderstand the text he should change it into something else.
Jorge Luis Borges
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I ask of any God, of any gods, that if they give immortality, I hope to be granted oblivion also.
Jorge Luis Borges
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There is no intellectual exercise which is not ultimately useless.
Jorge Luis Borges
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Being an agnostic means all things are possible, even God, even the Holy Trinity. This world is so strange that anything may happen, or may not happen. Being an agnostic makes me live in a larger, a more fantastic kind of world, almost uncanny. It makes me more tolerant.
Jorge Luis Borges
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I would define the baroque as that style that deliberately exhausts (or tries to exhaust) its own possibilities, and that borders on self-caricature. The baroque is the final stage in all art, when art flaunts and squanders its resources.
Jorge Luis Borges
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For myth is at the beginning of literature, and also at its end.
Jorge Luis Borges
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We are our memory, we are that chimerical museum of shifting shapes, that pile of broken mirrors.
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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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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It also occurred to him that throughout history, humankind has told two stories: the story of a lost ship sailing the Mediterranean seas in quest of a beloved isle, and the story of a god who allows himself to be crucified on Golgotha.
Jorge Luis Borges
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We did meet forty years ago. At that time we were both influenced by Whitman and I said, jokingly in part, 'I don't think anything can be done in Spanish, do you?' Neruda agreed, but we decided it was too late for us to write our verse in English. We'd have to make the best of a second-rate literature.
Jorge Luis Borges
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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
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If space is infinite, we may be at any point in space. If time is infinite, we may be at any point in time.
Jorge Luis Borges
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We (the indivisible divinity that works in us) have dreamed the world. We have dreamed it resistant, mysterious, visible, ubiquitous in space and firm in time, but we have allowed slight, and eternal, bits of the irrational to form part of its architecture so as to know that it is false.
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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Unlike the novel, a short story may be, for all purposes, essential.
Jorge Luis Borges
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A writer should have another lifetime to see if he's appreciated.
Jorge Luis Borges
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Personally, I am a hedonistic reader I have never read a book merely because it was ancient. I read books for the aesthetic emotions they offer me, and I ignore the commentaries and criticism.
Jorge Luis Borges