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I am not sure of anything, I know nothing . . . can you imagine that I don't even know the date of my own death?

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
Death
Anything
Nothing
Even
Date
Economics
Ignorance
Imagine
Sure

More quotes by 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 people of Tlön are taught that the act of counting modifies the amount counted, turning indefinites into definites. The fact that several persons counting the same quantity come to the same result is for the psychologists of Tlön an example of the association of ideas or of memorization.
Jorge Luis Borges
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The two important facts I should say, are emotion, and then words arising from emotion. I don't think you can write in an emotionless way. If you attempt it, the result is artificial. I don't like that kind of writing. I think that if a poem is really great, you should think of it as having written itself despite the author. It should flow.
Jorge Luis Borges
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While we are asleep in this world, we are awake in another one
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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No one is a poet from eight to twelve and from two to six. Whoever is a poet is one always, and continually assaulted by poetry.
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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How can we manage to illuminate the pathos of our lives?
Jorge Luis Borges
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Two aesthetics exist: the passive aesthetic of mirrors and the active aesthetic of prisms. Guided by the former, art turns into a copy of the environment's objectivity or the individual's psychic history. Guided by the latter, art is redeemed, makes the world into its instrument, and forges, beyond spatial and temporal prisons, a personal vision.
Jorge Luis Borges
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Any life, however long and complicated it may be, actually consists of a single moment — the moment when a man knows forever more who he is.
Jorge Luis Borges
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I'm not interested in the fact that a writer may label himself as being intellectual or anti-intellectual. l'm really interested in the stuff he's turning out.
Jorge Luis Borges
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Reality favors symmetry.
Jorge Luis Borges
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Time broadens the scope of verses and I know of some which, like music, are everything for all men.
Jorge Luis Borges
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That is what always happens: we never know whether we are victors or whether we are defeated.
Jorge Luis Borges
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La duda es uno de los nombres de la inteligencia.
Jorge Luis Borges
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I cannot walk through the suburbs in the solitude of the night without thinking that the night pleases us because it suppresses idle details, just as our memory does.
Jorge Luis Borges
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Time is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire.
Jorge Luis Borges
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In vain have oceans been squandered on you, in vain the sun, wonderfully seen through Whitman’s eyes. You have used up the years and they have used up you, and still, and still, you have not written the poem.
Jorge Luis Borges
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What will die with me the day I die? What pathetic or frail image will be lost to the world? The voice of Macedonio Fernandez, the image of a bay horse in a vacant lot on the corner of Sarrano and Charcas, a bar of sulfur in the drawer of a mahogany desk?
Jorge Luis Borges
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Life and death have been lacking in my life.
Jorge Luis Borges