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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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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
Subject
Chaotic
Subjects
Machine
Common
Arts
Exaggerate
Making
Combination
Mill
Fear
Library
Combinations
Art
Machines
Propensity
Play
Mathematics
Mills
Kind
Jokes
Metaphysics

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The mathematical sciences wield their particular language made of digits and signs, no less subtle than any other.
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As a boy, I used to marvel that the letters in a closed book did not get scrambled and lost overnight.
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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?
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If space is infinite, we may be at any point in space. If time is infinite, we may be at any point in time.
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I know of one semibarbarous zone whose librarians repudiate the vain and superstitious habit of trying to find sense in books, equating such a quest with attempting to find meaning in dreams or in the chaotic lines on the palms of one's hand.
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Reality is partial to symmetry and slight anachronisms
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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.
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In all fiction, when a man is faced with alternatives he chooses one at the expense of others.
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I thought of a labyrinth of labyrinths, of one sinuous spreading labyrinth that would encompass the past and the future . . . I felt myself to be, for an unknown period of time, an abstract perceiver of the world.
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A writer's work is the product of laziness.
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Reality is not always probable, or likely.
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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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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.
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Perhaps the apparent favor of the universe is no more than the crocodile grin of a Doberman breathing hard and about to be hungry?
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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.
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When one confesses to an act, one ceases to be an actor in it and becomes its witness, becomes a man that observes and narrates it and no longer the man that performed it.
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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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La duda es uno de los nombres de la inteligencia.
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Poets, like the blind, can see in the dark.
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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.
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