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

More quotes by Jorge Luis Borges

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Kafka had the sense of guilt. I don't think I have because I don't believe in free will. Because what I have done has been done, well, for me or through me. But I haven't done it really. But I don't believe in free will, I can't feel guilty.
Jorge Luis Borges
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As to my writing short pieces, there are two reasons I can give you. The first is my invincible laziness. The second is that I've always been fond of short stories, and it always took me some trouble to get through a novel.
Jorge Luis Borges
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What man of us has never felt, walking through the twilight or writing down a date from his past, that he has lost something infinite?
Jorge Luis Borges
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Everything touches everything.
Jorge Luis Borges
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Perhaps the apparent favor of the universe is no more than the crocodile grin of a Doberman breathing hard and about to be hungry?
Jorge Luis Borges
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I might accept immortality, if I had to do it. But I would prefer - if there is any afterlife - to know nothing whatever about Borges, about his experiences in this world.
Jorge Luis Borges
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I don't think esthetic schools are important. What is important is the use that is made of them, or whatever the individual writer does.
Jorge Luis Borges
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Each thing implies the universe.
Jorge Luis Borges
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The European and the North American consider that a book that has been awarded any kind of prize must be good the Argentine allows for the possibility that the book might not be bad, despite the prize.
Jorge Luis Borges
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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
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I have sometimes suspected that the only thing that holds no mystery is happiness, because it is its own justification.
Jorge Luis Borges
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The mightiest love was granted him Love that does not expect to be loved.
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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Leaving behind the babble of the plaza, I enter the Library. I feel, almost physically, the gravitation of the books, the enveloping serenity of order, time magically dessicated and preserved.
Jorge Luis Borges
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There is no intellectual exercise which is not ultimately useless.
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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I have preferred to teach my students not English literature but my love for certain authors, or, even better, certain pages, or even better than that, certain lines. One falls in love with a line, then with a page, then with an author. Well, why not? It is a beautiful process.
Jorge Luis Borges
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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
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I thought that a man can be an enemy of other men, of the moments of other men, but not of a country: not of fireflies, words, gardens, streams of water, sunsets.
Jorge Luis Borges
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To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god.
Jorge Luis Borges