"Unappreciated Shakespeare", Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News, Christmas Number, 9 December 1882.
“Nowadays, one of the churches of Tlön maintains platonically that such and such a pain, such and such a greenish-yellow colour, such and such a temperature, such and such a sound, etc., make up the only reality there is. All men, in the climactic instant of coitus, are the same man. All men who repeat one line of Shakespeare are William Shakespeare.”
Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius (1940)
Variant: Today, one of the churches of Tlön Platonically maintains that a certain pain, a certain greenish tint of yellow, a certain temperature, a certain sound, are the only reality. All men, in the vertiginous moment of coitus, are the same man. All men who repeat a line from Shakespeare are William Shakespeare.
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Jorge Luis Borges 213
Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator… 1899–1986Related quotes
“One can forgive Shakespeare anything, except one's own bad lines.”
Page 46.
The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde (1983)
“A court is only as sound as its jury, and a jury is only as sound as the men who make it up.”
Pt. 2, ch. 20
Atticus Finch
To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)
Context: I’m no idealist to believe firmly in the integrity of our courts and in the jury system — that is no ideal to me, it is a living, working reality. Gentlemen, a court is no better than each man of you sitting before me on this jury. A court is only as sound as its jury, and a jury is only as sound as the men who make it up.
Source: Speech in the House of Commons (22 January 1846), quoted in Selected Speeches of the Late Right Honourable the Earl of Beaconsfield, Volume I, ed. T. E. Kebbel (1882), p. 110
Essay of Dramatick Poesie (1668)
Context: To begin then with Shakespeare; he was the man who of all Modern, and perhaps Ancient Poets, had the largest and most comprehensive soul. All the Images of Nature were still present to him, and he drew them not laboriously, but luckily: when he describes any thing, you more than see it, you feel it too. Those who accuse him to have wanted learning, give him the greater commendation: he was naturally learn'd; he needed not the spectacles of Books to read Nature; he look'd inwards, and found her there. I cannot say he is every where alike; were he so, I should do him injury to compare him with the greatest of Mankind. He is many times flat, insipid; his Comick wit degenerating into clenches; his serious swelling into Bombast. But he is alwayes great, when some great occasion is presented to him: no man can say he ever had a fit subject for his wit, and did not then raise himself as high above the rest of the Poets
"Episode, Scene, Speech, and Word : The Madness of Lear", in Critics and Criticism : Ancient and Modern (1952), edited by R.S. Crane
Source: Sayings of Sri Ramakrishna (1960), p. 37
Quotes, 1881 - 1890, Letter to Maurice Beaubourg', August 1890