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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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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
Makes
Exist
Aesthetic
Aesthetics
Art
Beyond
Instrument
Objectivity
Two
Personal
Latter
Psychic
Forges
World
Environment
Mirrors
Psychics
Prisms
Vision
Former
Guided
Spatial
Turns
Instruments
Copy
Temporal
Individual
Active
Copies
Redeemed
History
Prison
Passive
Prisons

More quotes by Jorge Luis Borges

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To be immortal is commonplace except for man, all creatures are immortal, for they are ignorant of death what is divine, terrible, incomprehensible, is to know that one is immortal.
Jorge Luis Borges
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A writer should have another lifetime to see if he's appreciated.
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Let others pride themselves about how many pages they have written I'd rather boast about the ones I've read.
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It's a shame that we have to choose between two such second-rate countries as the USSR and the USA.
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May Heaven exist, even if my place is Hell.
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To die for a religion is easier than to live it absolutely.
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We have stopped believing in progress. What progress that is !
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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.
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So plant your own gardens and decorate your own soul, instead of waiting for someone to bring you flowers.
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.
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From my weakness, I drew strength that never left me.
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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In the order of literature, as in others, there is no act that is not the coronation of an infinite series of causes and the source of an infinite series of effects.
Jorge Luis Borges
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A writer's work is the product of laziness.
Jorge Luis Borges
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Reality is not always probable, or likely.
Jorge Luis Borges
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Films are even stranger, for what we are seeing are not disguised people but photographs of disguised people, and yet we believe them while the film is being shown.
Jorge Luis Borges
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There is nothing in the world that is not mysterious, but the mystery is more evident in certain things than in others: in the sea, in the eyes of the elders, in the color yellow, and in music.
Jorge Luis Borges
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Time, which despoils castles, enriches verses.
Jorge Luis Borges
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La duda es uno de los nombres de la inteligencia.
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