Jorge Luis Borges
Jorge Luis Borges
Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges KBE; 24 August 1899 – 14 June 1986), was an Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator, and a key figure in Spanish-language literature. His best-known books, Ficcionesand El Aleph, published in the 1940s, are compilations of short stories interconnected by common themes, including dreams, labyrinths, libraries, mirrors, fictional writers, philosophy, and religion...
NationalityArgentinian
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth24 August 1899
suffering documentation language
Translations are a partial and precious documentation of the changes the text suffers.
dream lying sleep
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.
reading hippie writing
Reading is an activity subsequent to writing: more resigned, more civil, more intellectual.
art remember pronunciation
Poetry remembers that it was an oral art before it was a written art.
procrastination men truth-is
The truth is that we live out our lives putting off all that can be put off; perhaps we all know deep down that we are immortal and that sooner or later all men will do and know all things.
originality unfaithful translate
The original is unfaithful to the translation.
father names library
If I were asked to name the chief event in my life, I should say my father's library,
facts oppression cruelty
Dictatorships foster oppression, dictatorships foster servitude, dictatorships foster cruelty; more abominable is the fact that they foster idiocy.
religion easier dies
To die for a religion is easier than to live it absolutely.
spring deeper
Poetry springs from something deeper; it's beyond intelligence.
ignorance imagine not-sure
I am not sure of anything, I know nothing . . . can you imagine that I don't even know the date of my own death?
missing experience values
What you really value is what you miss, not what you have.
dark blind poet
Poets, like the blind, can see in the dark.
reading thinking should
I think that the reader should enrich what he is reading. He should misunderstand the text; he should change it into something else.