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

More quotes by 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.
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Reality is partial to symmetry and slight anachronisms
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The Falklands thing was a fight between two bald men over a comb.
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When I write, I do it urged by an intimate necessity. I don't have in mind an exclusive public, or a public of multitudes, I don't think in either thing. I think about expressing what I want to say. I try to do it in the simplest way possible.
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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.
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A writer's work is the product of laziness.
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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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Art always opts for the individual, the concrete art is not Platonic.
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On the floor, and hanging on to the bar, squatted an old man, immobile as an object. His years had reduced and polished him as water does a stone or the generations of men do a sentence.
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I think that the reader should enrich what he is reading. He should misunderstand the text he should change it into something else.
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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.
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Reality favors symmetry.
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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 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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If a writer disbelieves what he is writing, then he can hardly expect his reader to believe it.
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I have tried (I am not sure how successfully) to write plain tales. I dare not say they are simple there is not a simple page, a simple word, on earth -\-\ for all pages, all words, predicate the universe, whose most notorious attribute is its complexity.
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I thought that a man can be an enemy of other men, of the moments of other men, but not of a country: not of fireflies, words, gardens, streams of water, sunsets.
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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.
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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