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
Time, which despoils castles, enriches verses.
Interpretation
Time affects all things but enhances literature and poetry.
In this quote, Borges suggests that while time may erode physical structures like castles, it simultaneously enriches the value and beauty of artistic creations such as poetry. This reflects the idea that the passage of time can lead to both decay and growth, ultimately favoring the lasting impact of art over the transient nature of worldly possessions.
In practice
In a speech about the power of literature, one could quote Borges to emphasize the lasting nature of poetic works.
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.
Good poets borrow, great poets steal
I nearly always write β just as I nearly always breathe.
I often conduct an orchestra in my sleep; my orchestras are so huge that the back desks of the violas vanish into the horizon. And everything is so wonderful.
I consider it useless and tedious to represent what exists, because nothing that exists satisfies me. Nature is ugly, and I prefer the monsters of my fancy to what is positively trivial.
Everyone is interesting. Everyone has something unexpected to offer and the job of acting is to pull it out of each other.
The thing to judge in any jazz artist is, does the man project and does he have ideas.
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