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

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In the course of a life devoted less to living than to reading, I have verified many times that literary intentions and theories are nothing more than stimuli and that the final work usually ignores or even contradicts them.
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I have sometimes suspected that the only thing that holds no mystery is happiness, because it is its own justification.
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While we are asleep in this world, we are awake in another one
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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.
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The worst labyrinth is not that intricate form that can entrap us forever, but a single and precise straight line
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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.
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I do not write for a select minority, which means nothing to me, nor for that adulated platonic entity known as ‘The Masses’. Both abstractions, so dear to the demagogue, I disbelieve in. I write for myself and for my friends, and I write to ease the passing of time.
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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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When you come right down to it, opinions are the most superficial things about anyone
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The future has no other reality than as present hope, and the past is no more than present memory.
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i walk slowly, like one who comes from so far away he doesn't expect to arrive
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We forget that we are all dead men conversing with dead men.
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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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The two important facts I should say, are emotion, and then words arising from emotion. I don't think you can write in an emotionless way. If you attempt it, the result is artificial. I don't like that kind of writing. I think that if a poem is really great, you should think of it as having written itself despite the author. It should flow.
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La duda es uno de los nombres de la inteligencia.
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Reality is not always probable, or likely.
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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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If a writer disbelieves what he is writing, then he can hardly expect his reader to believe it.
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There is no point in being overwhelmed by the appalling total of human sufferring such a total does not exist. Neither poverty nor pain is accumulable.
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Time is the tiger that devours me, but I am that tiger.
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