QuoteProject
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
ShareWTF𝕏

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.
Jorge Luis BorgesRead
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.
Jorge Luis BorgesRead
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.
Jorge Luis BorgesRead
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.
Jorge Luis BorgesRead
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.
Jorge Luis BorgesRead
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

Similar quotes

We have a market-driven society so obsessed with buying and selling and obsessed with power and pleasure and property.
Cornel WestRead
To cut and slash are two different things. Cutting, whatever form of cutting it is, is decisive, with a resolute spirit. Slashing is nothing more than touching the enemy.
Miyamoto MusashiRead
The willingness to be self-critical in England is much greater than the willingness to be self-critical in America.
Malcolm GladwellRead
He no longer dreamed of storms, nor of women, nor of great occurrences, nor of great fish, nor fights, nor contests of strength, nor of his wife. He only dreamed of places now and the lions on the beach. They played like young cats in the dusk and he loved them as he loved the boy. He never dreamed about the boy. He simply woke, looked out the open door at the moon and unrolled his trousers and put them on.
Ernest HemingwayRead
To be white in America is to have the confidence to say, without a second thought: this space, this neighborhood, this city, this county, this country is mine.
Joy ReidRead
The misery we inflict on sentient beings slackens our human evolution.
Annie BesantRead

A little wisdom, now and then

Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.