Jorge Luis Borges cytaty (258 cytatów, strona 5)

Źródło: Noc, kiedy na południu nad nim czuwali w: E. Stachura, Wiersze, poematy, piosenki, przekłady, wyd. Czytelnik, Warszawa 1982, s. 332, tłum. Edward Stachura.

O śmierci , O przyjaźni , O książkach , O świecie

„Potem pomyślał, że rzeczywistość nie pokrywa się na ogół z przewidywaniami; z przewrotną logiką wywnioskował stąd, że przewidzieć jakąś okoliczność to udaremnić jej realizację. Wierny tej wątłej magii wymyślał okrutne szczegóły po to, aby się one nie wydarzyły.”

Jorge Luis Borges

Opowiadania
Źródło: opowiadanie Tajemny cud

O rzeczywostości

„Mówić to popadać w tautologie.”

Jorge Luis Borges

Opowiadania
Źródło: opowiadanie Biblioteka Babel

„Tak bowiem na początku literatury, jak i na końcu, jest mit.”

Jorge Luis Borges

O literaturze

„Między początkiem dnia a nocą jest otchłań
świateł i lęków, i agonii;
twarz, która przegląda się w nocnych
zużytych lustrach, to nie ta sama twarz, obca.
Ulotne dzisiaj wątłe jest i to jest wieczność;
na inne nie licz Niebo, ani na inne Piekło.”

Jorge Luis Borges

Źródło: Chwila w: E. Stachura, Wiersze, poematy, piosenki, przekłady, wyd. Czytelnik, Warszawa 1982, s. 360, tłum. Edward Stachura.

O piekle , O świetle

„Jeżeli wieczność istnieje, śmierć jest tylko żartem.”

Jorge Luis Borges

O śmierci

„Znam pewien labirynt grecki, złożony z jedynej linii prostej. W tej linii zagubiło się już tylu filozofów, że z łatwością może się zgubić zwykły detektyw.”

Jorge Luis Borges

Opowiadania
Źródło: opowiadanie Śmierć i busola

O śmierci

„O literaturze powiem to, co można bez wątpienia rzec o duszy: każdy powinien osiągnąć zbawienie, a można je osiągnąć tylko pokonując błędy.”

Jorge Luis Borges

Źródło: Michał Sprusiński, posłowie do Księgi piasku

O duszy , O literaturze

„Wydaje mi się, że jako pisarz popełniłem już wszystkie możliwe błędy, co zresztą jest jedyną drogą do prawdziwego pisarstwa.”

Jorge Luis Borges

Źródło: Michał Sprusiński, posłowie do Księgi piasku

„Jednej tylko rzeczy nie ma. To zapomnienie.”

Jorge Luis Borges

Źródło: Everness w: E. Stachura, Wiersze, poematy, piosenki, przekłady, wyd. Czytelnik, Warszawa 1982, s. 366, tłum. Edward Stachura.

Jorge Luis Borges: Cytaty po angielsku

“The man who acquires an encyclopedia does not thereby acquire every line, every paragraph, every page, and every illustration; he acquires the possibility of becoming familiar with one and another of those things.”

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Jorge Luis Borges

Shakespeare's Memory, (1983); as translated by Andrew Hurley in Collected Fictions (1998)

“Razed the garden, profaned the chalices and the altars, by horse the Huns broke into the Monastic library and they tore the incomprehensible books and they vituperated them and they burnt them, fearing their symbols and characters might be concealing secret blasphemies against their God, who was an iron scimitar…”

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Jorge Luis Borges

Arrasado el jardín, profanados los cálices y las aras, entraron a caballo los hunos en la biblioteca monástica y rompieron los libros incomprensibles y los vituperaron y los quemaron, acaso temerosos de que las letras encubrieran blasfemias contra su dios, que era una cimitarra de hierro.
The Theologians [Los Teólogos]

“It is clear that there is no classification of the Universe that is not arbitrary and full of conjectures. The reason for this is very simple: we do not know what kind of thing the universe is.”

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Jorge Luis Borges książka The Analytical Language of John Wilkins

As translated by Will Fitzgerald
Other Inquisitions (1952), The Analytical Language of John Wilkins

“There are people who barely feel poetry, and they are generally dedicated to teaching it.”

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Jorge Luis Borges

"Poetry" (1977)

“I tried mescaline and cocaine in my youth, but I immediately switched to mint candy, which was more stimulating. I am not interested in drugs if they produce the same effects as alcohol. A drunkard is evidently ridiculous. I have been drunk some times, and I remember them as horrible experiences for me and everyone else.”

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Jorge Luis Borges

En mi juventud probé la mescalina y la cocaína pero enseguida me pasé a los pastillas de menta que me parecieron más estimulantes. Si las drogas producen el mismo efecto que el alcohol, no me interesan. Un borracho es evidentemente ridículo. He estado borracho algunas veces y lo recuerdo como una experiencia muy desagradable para los demás y para mí.
As quoted in Borges, El palabrista (1999) by Estebán Peicovich, p. 53

“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.”

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Jorge Luis Borges książka Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius

Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius (1940)
Wariant: 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.

“I will pause to consider this eternity from which the subsequent ones derive.”

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Jorge Luis Borges

"A History of Eternity" in Selected Non-Fictions Vol. 1, (1999), edited by Eliot Weinberger

“The exercise of letters is sometimes linked to the ambition to construct an absolute book, a book of books that includes the others like a Platonic archetype, an object whose virtues are not diminished by the passage of time.”

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Jorge Luis Borges

"Note on Walt Whitman" ["Nota sobre Walt Whitman"]
Discussion (1932)

“It is worth remembering that every writer begins with a naively physical notion of what art is. A book for him or her is not an expression or a series of expressions, but literally a volume, a prism with six rectangular sides made of thin sheets of papers which should include a cover, an inside cover, an epigraph in italics, a preface, nine or ten parts with some verses at the beginning, a table of contents, an ex libris with an hourglass and a Latin phrase, a brief list of errata, some blank pages, a colophon and a publication notice: objects that are known to constitute the art of writing.”

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Jorge Luis Borges książka Evaristo Carriego: A Book About Old-Time Buenos Aires

Evaristo Carriego (1930) Ch. 3

“Your unforgivable sins do not allow you to see my splendor.”

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Jorge Luis Borges

"The masked dyer Hakim of Merv" [El tintorero enmascarado Hakim de Merv] Universal History of Infamy (1935); also translated as "Hakim, Masked Dyer of Merv" ( review of "Hakim, Masked Dyer of Merv" http://www.elimae.com/reviews/borges/merv.html)

“Dictatorships foster oppression, dictatorships foster servitude, dictatorships foster cruelty; more abominable is the fact that they foster idiocy.”

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Jorge Luis Borges

Statement to the Argentine Society of Letters (c.1946)

“Wilde was not a great poet nor a consummate prose writer. He was a very astute Irishman who encompassed in epigrams an esthetic credo which others before him scattered in the space of long pages. He was an enfant terrible.”

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Jorge Luis Borges książka Luna De Enfrente

"A Poem by Oscar Wilde" http://www.themodernword.com/borges/borges_wilde.html (1925) An essay on Wilde and his Ballad of Reading Gaol.

“There are no moral or intellectual merits. Homer composed the Odyssey; if we postulate an infinite period of time, with infinite circumstances and changes, the impossible thing is not to compose the Odyssey, at least once.”

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Jorge Luis Borges książka The Immortal

"The Immortal" (1949)

“The Falklands thing was a fight between two bald men over a comb.”

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Jorge Luis Borges

On the Falklands War, as quoted in Time magazine (14 February 1983)

“Universal history is the history of a few metaphors.”

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Jorge Luis Borges książka Other Inquisitions

"Pascal’s Sphere" ["La esfera de Pascal"] (1951)
Variant translations: Perhaps universal history is the history of the diverse intonation of some metaphors.
It may be that universal history is the history of the different intonations given a handful of metaphors.
Other Inquisitions (1952)

“I found America the friendliest, most forgiving, and most generous nation I had ever visited. We South Americans tend to think of things in terms of convenience, whereas people in the United States approach things ethically. This — amateur Protestant that I am — I admired above all. It even helped me overlook skyscrapers, paper bags, television, plastics, and the unholy jungle of gadgets.”

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Jorge Luis Borges

Autobiographical Notes (1970)

“This was the first time Remington rifles were used in the Argentine, and it tickles my fancy to think that the firm that shaves me every morning bears the same name as the one that killed my grandfather.”

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Jorge Luis Borges

Autobiographical Notes (1970)

“In the work of Ts'ui Pên, all possible outcomes occur; each one is the point of departure for other forkings. Sometimes, the paths of this labyrinth converge: for example, you arrive at this house, but in one of the possible pasts you are my enemy, in another, my friend.”

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Jorge Luis Borges

The Garden of Forking Paths (1942), The Garden of Forking Paths

“The minotaur more than justifies the existence of the labyrinth.”

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Jorge Luis Borges

"Ibn-Hakim Al-Bokhari, Murdered in His Labyrinth", in The Aleph (1949); tr. Andrew Hurley, Collected Fictions (1998)

“Every novel is an ideal plane inserted into the realm of reality.”

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Jorge Luis Borges książka Labyrinths

"Partial Magic in the Quixote", Labyrinths (1964)

“That history should have imitated history was already sufficiently marvellous; that history should imitate literature is inconceivable….”

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Jorge Luis Borges książka Ficciones

"Theme of the Traitor and Hero"
Ficciones (1944)

“The heresies we should fear are those which can be confused with orthodoxy.”

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Jorge Luis Borges książka The Theologians

The Theologians, translated by James E. Irby (1964)

“The time for your labor has been granted.”

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Jorge Luis Borges książka Ficciones

"The Secret Miracle"
Ficciones (1944)

“May Heaven exist, even if my place is Hell.”

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Jorge Luis Borges książka The Library of Babel

Que el cielo exista, aunque mi lugar sea el infierno.
"The Library of Babel" (1941)
Variants:
I cannot think it unlikely that there is such a total book on some shelf in the universe. I pray to the unknown gods that some man — even a single man, tens of centuries ago — has perused and read this book. If the honor and wisdom and joy of such a reading are not to be my own, then let them be for others. Let heaven exist, though my own place may be in hell. Let me be tortured and battered and annihilated, but let there be one instant, one creature, wherein thy enormous Library may find its justification.
May Heaven exist, even if our place is Hell.
"Deutsches Requiem". (Emece edition, 1974)

“I have known that thing the Greeks knew not – uncertainty.”

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Jorge Luis Borges

"The Lottery in Babylon"; tr. Andrew Hurley, Collected Fictions (1998)
The Garden of Forking Paths (1942)
Wariant: I have known uncertainty: a state unknown to the Greeks.

“The execution was set for the 29th of March, at nine in the morning. This delay was due to a desire on the part of the authorities to act slowly and impersonally, in the manner of planets or vegetables.”

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Jorge Luis Borges książka Ficciones

"The Secret Miracle"
Ficciones (1944)

“Of course, like all young men, I tried to be as unhappy as I could — a kind of Hamlet and Raskolnikov rolled into one.”

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Jorge Luis Borges

Autobiographical Notes (1970)

“We (the indivisible divinity that works in us) have dreamed the world. We have dreamed it resistant, mysterious, visible, ubiquitous in space and firm in time, but we have allowed slight, and eternal, bits of the irrational to form part of its architecture so as to know that it is false.”

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Jorge Luis Borges

"Avatars of the Tortoise" ["Avatares de la tortuga"]
Discussion (1932)

“Well, he wrote a book -- well, maybe here I'm being political -- he wrote a book about the tyrants of South America, and then he had several stanzas against the United States. Now he knows that that's rubbish. And he had not a word against Perón. Because he had a law suit in Buenos Aires, that was explained to me afterwards, and he didn't care to risk anything. And so, when he was supposed to be writing at the top of his voice, full of noble indignation, he had not a word to say against Perón. And he was married to an Argentine lady, he knew that many of his friends had been sent to jail. He knew all about the state of our country, but not a word against him. At the same time, he was speaking against the United States, knowing the whole thing was a lie, no? But, of course, that doesn't mean anything against his poetry. Neruda is a very fine poet, a great poet in fact. And when they gave Miguel de Asturias the Nobel Prize, I said that it should have been given to Neruda! Now when I was in Chile, and we were on different political sides, I think he did the best thing to do. He went on a holiday during the three or four days I was there so there was no occasion for our meeting. But I think he was acting politely, no? Because he knew that people would be playing him up against me, no? I mean, I was an Argentine, poet, he was a Chilean poet, he's on the side of the Communists, I'm against them. So I felt he was behaving very wisely in avoiding a meeting that would have been quite uncomfortable for both of us.”

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Jorge Luis Borges

Page 96.
Conversations with Jorge Luis Borges (1968)

“I have sometimes suspected that the only thing that holds no mystery is happiness, because it is its own justification.”

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Jorge Luis Borges

He sospechado alguna vez que la única cosa sin misterio es la felicidad, porque se justifica por sí sola.
"Unworthy", in Brodie's Report (1970); tr. Andrew Hurley, Collected Fictions (1998)
Wariant: I have thought from time to time that the only thing without mystery is happiness, since it justifies itself.