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

More quotes by Jorge Luis Borges

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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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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 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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Art always opts for the individual, the concrete art is not Platonic.
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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Time is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire.
Jorge Luis Borges
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The thought came over me that never would one full and absolute moment, containing all the others, justify my life, that all of my instants would be provisional phases, annihilators of the past turned to face the future, and that beyond the episodic, the present, the circumstantial, we were nobody.
Jorge Luis Borges
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I secretly assumed, as poets do, The duty on me to define the moon.
Jorge Luis Borges
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My father and he had cemented one of those English friendships which begin by avoiding intimacies and eventually eliminate speech altogether.
Jorge Luis Borges
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I believe that in time we will have reached the point where we will deserve to be free of government.
Jorge Luis Borges
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I have always come to life after coming to books.
Jorge Luis Borges
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You have wakened not out of sleep, but into a prior dream, and that dream lies within another, and so on, to infinity, which is the number of grains of sand. The path that you are to take is endless, and you will die before you have truly awakened.
Jorge Luis Borges
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I know that when I think of myself as being utterly worn out, when I think that somehow I have nothing more to write, then something is happening within me. And, in due course, it bubbles up it comes to the surface, and then I do my best to listen. But there's nothing mystical about all this. I suppose all writers do the same.
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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There are those who seek the love of a woman to forget her, to not think about her.
Jorge Luis Borges
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I can’t talk about my books. I have written them and tried to forget them. I have written once, and readers have read me many times, no? I try to think of what I wrote, it’s very unhealthy to think about the past, the case of elegies is very sad, as much as the case of complaints.
Jorge Luis Borges
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What I'm really concerned about is reaching one person. And that person may be myself for all I know.
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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i walk slowly, like one who comes from so far away he doesn't expect to arrive
Jorge Luis Borges
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Another school declares that all time has already transpired and that our life is only the crepuscular and no doubt falsified and mutilated memory or reflection of an irrecoverable process.
Jorge Luis Borges