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Writing long books is a laborious and impoverishing act of foolishness: expanding in five hundred pages an idea that could be perfectly explained in a few minutes. A better procedure is to pretend that those books already exist and to offer a summary, a commentary.
Jorge Luis Borges
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Interpretation

What this quote means

Borges critiques the verbosity of lengthy books, suggesting that ideas can be conveyed more succinctly.

In this quote, Jorge Luis Borges reflects on the nature of writing and the economy of expression. He argues that many lengthy books are often unnecessary, as their central ideas could be communicated much more succinctly. Instead of expanding an idea into hundreds of pages, Borges advocates for a more thoughtful approach where one synthesizes and summarizes existing ideas, thus preserving clarity and depth without the clutter of excess words.

Themes

BrevityWritingExpressionPhilosophyClarity

In practice

Example use cases

This quote can be used in a writing workshop to encourage brevity in students' essays.

More from Jorge Luis Borges

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.
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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.
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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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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.
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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.
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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.
Jorge Luis BorgesRead

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Quote by Jorge Luis Borges | QuoteProject