You can't measure time by days, the way you measure money by dollars and cents, because dollars are all the same while every day is different and maybe every hour as well.
Jorge Luis BorgesRead
The flattery of posterity is not worth much more than contemporary flattery, which is worth nothing.
Interpretation
Flattery from future generations holds little value, similar to the empty compliments of the present.
In this quote, Jorge Luis Borges suggests that the praise we seek from others, whether it comes from our contemporaries or from future generations, is ultimately insignificant. Both forms of flattery are seen as lacking true substance or worth, emphasizing the idea that one's true value lies beyond the fleeting opinions of others.
In practice
In a graduation speech emphasizing individuality over public perception.
You can't measure time by days, the way you measure money by dollars and cents, because dollars are all the same while every day is different and maybe every hour as well.
To say good-bye is to deny separation; it is to say Today we play at going our own ways, but we'll see each other tomorrow. Men invented farewells because they somehow knew themselves to be immortal, even while seeing themselves as contingent and ephemeral.
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.
This felicitous supposition declared that there is only one Individual, and that this indivisible Individual is every one of the separate beings in the universe, and that these beings are the instruments and masks of divinity itself.
A man sets out to draw the world. As the years go by, he peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, instruments, stars, horses, and individuals. A short time before he dies, he discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines traces the lineaments of his own face.
Let neither tear nor reproach besmirch this declaration of the mastery of God who, with magnificent irony, granted me both the gift of books and the night.
Where the preamble declares, that coercion is a departure from the plan of the holy author of our religion, an amendment was proposed by inserting "Jesus Christ," so that it would read "A departure from the plan of Jesus Christ, the holy author of our religion;" the insertion was rejected by the great majority, in proof that they meant to comprehend, within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mohammedan, the Hindoo and Infidel of every denomination.
Whoever lives among many evils just as I, how can dying not be a source of gain?
To be desired is perhaps the closest anybody in this life can reach to feeling immortal.
We must question the story logic of having an all-knowing all-powerful God, who creates faulty Humans, and then blames them for his own mistakes.
People care more about being thought to have taste than about being thought either good, clever or amiable.
Assuming if there's such a thing as reality, if you have a false relationship with it, how can you do anything but fail?
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