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
Like all those possessing a library, Aurelian was aware that he was guilty of not knowing his in its entirety.
Interpretation
The quote highlights the awareness of knowledge gaps even among those who possess vast resources of information.
In this quote, Borges reflects on the irony of possessing a library while simultaneously recognizing the limitations of one's own knowledge. Aurelian's realization serves as a reminder that even with access to extensive information, true understanding often eludes us, emphasizing the value of continuous learning and the acknowledgment of our own ignorance.
In practice
During a lecture on the importance of continual education, I would quote this to emphasize our limits in knowledge.
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.
The most powerful teaching of children is by the example of their parents.
Children are not simply commodities to be herded into line and trained for the jobs that white people who live in segregated neighborhoods have available.
A man only learns by two things; one is reading and the other is association with smarter people.
It is absurd and anti-life to be part of a system that compels you to listen to a stranger reading poetry when you want to learn to construct buildings, or to sit with a stranger discussing the construction of buildings when you want to read poetry.
To read great books does not mean one becomes βbookishβ; it means that something of the terrible insight of Dostoyevsky, of the richly-charged imagination of Shakespeare, of the luminous wisdom of Goethe, actually passes into the personality of the reader; so that in contact with the chaos of ordinary life certain free and flowing outlines emerge, like the forms of some classic picture, endowing both people and things with a grandeur beyond what is visible to the superficial glance.
You should write because you love the shape of stories and sentences and the creation of different words on a page. Writing comes from reading, and reading is the finest teacher of how to write.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.