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
It may be that universal history is the history of the different intonations given a handful of metaphors.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote suggests that history is shaped by the varied interpretations of a few essential ideas.
Jorge Luis Borges posits that universal history can be boiled down to how a limited number of fundamental metaphors have been expressed and understood across different cultures and times. This perspective emphasizes the importance of language and metaphor in human experience, indicating that our interpretations of events are more influential in shaping history than the events themselves.
Themes
HistoryMetaphorInterpretationCultureMeaning
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech on the significance of literature in shaping society.
More from Jorge Luis Borges
All quotes βTo 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
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