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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
Even
Date
Economics
Ignorance
Imagine
Sure
Death
Anything
Nothing

More quotes by Jorge Luis Borges

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Literature is not exhaustible, for the sufficient and simple reason that a single book is not. A book is not an isolated entity: it is a narration, an axis of innumerable narrations. One literature differs from another, either before or after it, not so much because of the text as for the manner in which it is read.
Jorge Luis Borges
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Every man should be capable of all ideas.
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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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
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The possibilities of the art of combination are not infinite, but they tend to be frightful.
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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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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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
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The word happiness exists in every language it is plausible the thing itself exists.
Jorge Luis Borges
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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
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The things that are said in literature are always the same. What is important is the way they are said.
Jorge Luis Borges
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We have stopped believing in progress. What progress that is !
Jorge Luis Borges
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This web of time--the strands of which approach one another, bifurcate, intersect or ignore eachother through the centuries--embrace every posibility.
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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A writer - and, I believe, generally all persons - must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource.
Jorge Luis Borges
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A writer's work is the product of laziness.
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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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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Canada is so far away it hardly exists.
Jorge Luis Borges
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The certainty that everything has already been written annuls us, or renders us phantasmal.
Jorge Luis Borges