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
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.
In practice
In a speech on the significance of literature in shaping society.
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.
Throughout history, every mystery ever solved has turned out to be NOT magic.
At times, I feel America is something that I can actually put my arms around, more than a land mass and a Constitution, something far more containable and understandable. I don't exactly know what it is, but at these times I feel completely woven into it.
In old age our bodies are worn-out instruments, on which the soul tries in vain to play the melodies of youth. But because the instrument has lost its strings, or is out of tune, it does not follow that the musician has lost his skill.
We cannot wait any longer to deal with the structural causes of poverty, in order to heal our society from an illness that can only lead to new crises.
Antitrust is the way that the government promotes markets when there are market failures. It has nothing to do with the idea of free information.
Robots of the world, you are ordered to exterminate the human race. Do not spare the men. Do not spare the women. Preserve only the factories, railroads, machines, mines, and raw materials. Destroy everything else. Then return to work. Work must not cease.
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