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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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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
Way
Modest
Library
Critics
Criticism
Quiet
Practice
Inspirational
Art
Arrange

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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.
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How can we manage to illuminate the pathos of our lives?
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Translations are a partial and precious documentation of the changes the text suffers.
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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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I have known uncertainty: a state unknown to the Greeks.
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Writing is only a guided dream.
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For me, beauty is a physical sensation, something we feel with our whole body. It is not the result of judgement. We do not arrive at it by way of rules. We either feel beauty or we don't.
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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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I confess that I have not cleared a path through all seven hundred pages, I confess to having examined only bits and pieces, and yet I know what it is, with that bold and legitimate certainty with which we assert our knowledge of a city, without ever having been rewarded with the intimacy of all the many streets it includes.
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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?
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The central fact of my life has been the existence of words and the possibility of weaving those words into poetry.
Jorge Luis Borges
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We are as ignorant of the meaning of the dragon as we are of the meaning of the universe.
Jorge Luis Borges
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Chang Tzu tells us of a persevering man who after three laborious years mastered the art of dragon-slaying. For the rest of his days, he had not a single opportunity to test his skills.
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Once I am dead, there will be no lack of pious hands to throw me over the railing my grave will be the fathomless air my body will sink endlessly and decay and dissolve in the wind generated by the fall, which is infinite.
Jorge Luis Borges
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I don't think I can really believe in doomsday I could hardly believe in rewards and punishments, in heaven or hell. As I wrote down in one of my sonnets - I seem to be always plagiarizing, imitating myself or somebody else for that matter - I think I am quite unworthy of heaven or of hell, and even of immortality.
Jorge Luis Borges
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The art of writing is mysterious the opinions we hold are ephemeral , and I prefer the Platonic idea of the Muse to that of Poe, who reasoned, or feigned to reason, that the writing of a poem is an act of the intelligence. It never fails to amaze me that the classics hold a romantic theory of poetry, and a romantic poet a classical theory.
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The tango is a direct expression of something that poets have often tried to state in words: the belief that a fight may be a celebration.
Jorge Luis Borges
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I have no personal system of philosophy. I never attempt to do that. I am merely a man of letters.
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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I don't think we're capable of knowledge, but I like to keep an open mind. So if you ask me whether I believe in an afterlife or not, whether I believe in God or not, I can only answer you that all things are possible. And if all things are possible, heaven and hell and the angels are also possible. They're not to be ruled out.
Jorge Luis Borges