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
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.
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
All quotes →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
Although nature commences with reason and ends in experience it is necessary for us to do the opposite, that is to commence with experience and from this to proceed to investigate the reason.
Leonardo Da VinciRead
One of God's central qualities is compassion, a word that in Hebrew is related to the word for "womb." Not only is compassion a female image suggesting source of life and nourishment but it also has a feeling dimension: God as compassionate Spirit feels for us as a mother feels for the children of her womb. Spirit feels the suffering of the world and participates in it. . . .
Marcus BorgRead
Never have I witnessed such sincere hospitality and _x000D_ the overwhelming spirit of true brotherhood as is practiced _x000D_ by people of all colours and races here in this ancient Holy Land, _x000D_ the home of Abraham, Muhammad, and all the other prophets _x000D_ of the Holy Scriptures. For the past week, I have been utterly _x000D_ speechless and spellbound by the graciousness I see displayed _x000D_ all around me by people of all colours.
Malcolm XRead
The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.
Henry David ThoreauRead
I slide my arm from under the sleeper's head and it is numb, full of swarming pins, on the tip of each, waiting to be counted, the fallen angels sit.
Wislawa SzymborskaRead
And the mind that has conceived a plan of living must never lose sight of the chaos against which that pattern was conceived. That goes for societies as well as for individuals.
Ralph EllisonRead