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.
Interpretation
Time is unique and cannot be quantified like money, as each moment has its own value and experience.
Jorge Luis Borges emphasizes the idea that time is not a uniform commodity like money. While financial value can be measured in identical units, each day and hour brings unique experiences, emotions, and events that cannot be neatly quantified. This quote encourages a deeper contemplation of our relationship with time, suggesting that we should appreciate the richness of each moment rather than treating time as a mere resource to be spent.
In practice
In a discussion about the significance of living in the moment, one might say, 'You can't measure time by days.'
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.
Then I reflect that all things happen, happen to one, precisely now. Century follows century, and things happen only in the present. There are countless men in the air, on land and at sea, and all that really happens happens to me.
Cheap food is an illusion. There is no such thing as cheap food. The real cost of the food is paid somewhere. And if it isn't paid at the cash register, it's charged to the environment or to the public purse in the form of subsidies. And it's charged to your health.
I am much inclined to live from my rucksack, and let my trousers fray as they like.
Of our relation to all creation we can never know anything whatsoever. All is immensity and chaos. But, since all this knowledge of our limitations cannot possibly be of any value to us, it is better to ignore it in our daily conduct of life.
Loyalty is the holiest good in the human heart.
Life has to be given a meaning because of the obvious fact that it has no meaning.
It is essential that justice be done, and it is equally vital that justice not be confused with revenge, for the two are wholly different.
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