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
There is an hour of the afternoon when the plain is on the verge of saying something. It never says, or perhaps it says it infinitely, or perhaps we do not understand it, or we understand it and it is untranslatable as music.
Interpretation
This quote reflects on the elusive nature of communication and understanding, particularly in relation to profound experiences or feelings.
In this quote, Jorge Luis Borges meditates on the ineffable quality of certain moments in nature, suggesting that there is an intimated message or feeling during the afternoon when the landscape seems poised to reveal something deeper. However, this message may be beyond verbal articulation, akin to music, highlighting the limitations of language in conveying the richness of our experiences and perceptions.
In practice
This quote can be shared during a discussion on the power of art to communicate feelings that words cannot.
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.
Your primary purpose is to be here fully, and to be total in whatever you do so that the preciousness of the present moment does not become reduced to a means to an end. And there you have your life purpose. That's the very foundation of your life.
It is not possible to conceive a democratic Guatemala, free and independent, without the indigenous identity shaping its character into all aspects of national existence.
The decline of violence is a fractal phenomenon. You can see it over millennia, over centuries, over decades and over years.
Civilization largely consists in hiding human nature. When the barbarian learns to hide it we account him enlightened.
All things human hang by a slender thread; and that which seemed to stand strong suddenly falls and sinks in ruins.
Mistakes are joyful, truth infernal.
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