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.
There is no point in being overwhelmed by the appalling total of human sufferring; such a total does not exist. Neither poverty nor pain is accumulable.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote suggests that one should not become paralyzed by the enormity of human suffering since it cannot be quantified or accumulated.
Jorge Luis Borges articulates the idea that the immense weight of human suffering may feel overwhelming when considered as a whole; however, he asserts that suffering is not something that can be measured or compared like a total. Each individual's experience of pain and poverty is unique and cannot simply be added up or generalized, encouraging a perspective that focuses on individual experiences rather than a collective burden.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
During a speech on humanitarian efforts, one might use this quote to emphasize the importance of focusing on individual cases of suffering rather than becoming despondent about global issues.
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.
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.
Similar quotes
Living for Sabina meant seeing. Seeing is limited by two borders: strong light, which blinds, and total darkness. Perhaps that was what motivated Sabina's distaste for all extremism. Extremes mean borders beyond which life ends, and a passion for extremism, in art and in politics, is a veiled longing for death.
We must have done something very wicked before we were born, or else we must be going to be very happy indeed when we are dead, for God to let this life have all the tortures of expiation and all the sorrows of an ordeal.
Not he who has little, but he whose wishes more, is poor.
The conflict that exists today is no more than an old-style struggle for power, once again presented to mankind in semireligious trappings. The difference is that, this time, the development of atomic power has imbued the struggle with a ghostly character; for both parties know and admit that, should the quarrel deteriorate into actual war, mankind is doomed.
Hurried and worried until we're buried, and there's no curtain call, Lifes a very funny proposition after all.
To claim you are more detached, more alien to everything than anyone, and to be merely a fanatic of indifference!