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
His life, measured in space and time, will take up a mere few lines, which my ignorance will abbreviate further.
Interpretation
This quote reflects on the brevity of life and our limited understanding of it.
Jorge Luis Borges expresses a poignant thought about the limitations of human existence. He suggests that our lives, when considered within the confines of space and time, are incredibly brief and will ultimately be summarized or misunderstood by others, highlighting the complexity and depth of human experience that often goes unrecognized or overlooked.
In practice
In a graduation speech to remind students to cherish their short time in academia.
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.
I live in the borderlands. The word ghost sounds like memory. The word therapy means exorcism. My visions echo and multiplymultiply. I don't know how to figure out what they mean. I can't tell where they start or if they will end. But I know this. If they shrink my head any more, or float me away on an ocean of pills, I will never return.
If you want to know what a given society believes in, look at what its largest buildings are devoted to.
Suffering is actually at the heart of the Christian story.
When childhood dies, its corpses are called adults and they enter society, one of the politer names of hell. That is why we dread children, even if we love them, they show us the state of our decay.
Always our wars have been our confessions of weakness
There couldn't be a society of people who didn't dream. They'd be dead in two weeks.
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