“He thought that the rose was to be found in its own eternity and not in his words; and that we may mention or allude to a thing, but not express it.”
Source: Dreamtigers
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Jorge Luis Borges 213
Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator… 1899–1986Related quotes
“Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.”
Variant: Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.
The Fantastic Imagination (1893)
Context: "But a man may then imagine in your work what he pleases, what you never meant!"
Not what he pleases, but what he can. If he be not a true man, he will draw evil out of the best; we need not mind how he treats any work of art! If he be a true man, he will imagine true things: what matter whether I meant them or not? They are there none the less that I cannot claim putting them there! One difference between God's work and man's is, that, while God's work cannot mean more than he meant, man's must mean more than he meant. For in everything that God has made, there is layer upon layer of ascending significance; also he expresses the same thought in higher and higher kinds of that thought: it is God's things, his embodied thoughts, which alone a man has to use, modified and adapted to his own purposes, for the expression of his thoughts; therefore he cannot help his words and figures falling into such combinations in the mind of another as he had himself not foreseen, so many are the thoughts allied to every other thought, so many are the relations involved in every figure, so many the facts hinted in every symbol. A man may well himself discover truth in what he wrote; for he was dealing all the time with things that came from thoughts beyond his own.
Entry (1950)
Eric Hoffer and the Art of the Notebook (2005)
Ramakrishna Mission. (1986). Ramakrishna Mission: In search of a new identity.
Source: Cours de linguistique générale (1916), p. 111-112
Source: Course in General Linguistics
Context: Psychologically our thought-apart from its expression in words-is only a shapeless and indistinct mass. Philosophers and linguists have always agreed in recognizing that without the help of signs we would be unable to make a clear-cut, consistent distinction between two ideas. Without language, thought is a vague, uncharted nebula. here are no pre-existing ideas, and nothing is distinct before the appearance of language.
pg. 39
The Sports and Pastimes of the People of England (1801), Hunting