11 Jorge Luis Borges Quotes on History

Jorge Luis Borges quotes on history

25. Arrasado el jardin, profanados los calices y las aras, entraron a caballo los hunos en la biblioteca monastica y rompieron los libros incomprensibles y los vituperaron y los quemaron, acaso temerosos de que las letras encubrieran blasfemias contra su dios, que era una cimitarra de hierro.

38. Life itself is a quotation.

65. There is no exercise of the intellect which is not, in the final analysis, useless. A philosophical doctrine begins as a plausible description of the universe; with the passage of the years it becomes a mere chapter - if not a paragraph or a name - in the history of philosophy.

81. That history should have imitated history was already sufficiently marvellous; that history should imitate literature is inconceivable....

95. Universal history is the history of a few metaphors.

97. 'Wakefield' prefigures Franz Kafka, but the latter modifies, and sharpens, the reading of 'Wakefield.' The debt is mutual; a great writer creates his or her precursors. He or she creates them and in some fashion justifies them.

109. On September 20, 1792, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (who had accompanied the Duke of Weimar on a military expedition to Paris) saw the finest army of Europe inexplicably repulsed at Valmy by some French militiamen, and said to his disconcerted friends: 'In this place and on this day, a new epoch in the history of the world is beginning, and we shall be able to say that we have been present at its origin.' Since that time historic days have been numerous, and one of the tasks of governments (especially in Italy, Germany, and Russia) has been to fabricate them or to simulate them with an abundance of preconditioning propaganda followed by relentless publicity.

110. I have suspected that history, real history, is more modest and that its essential dates may be, for a long time, secret. A Chinese prose writer has observed that the unicorn, because of its own anomaly, will pass unnoticed. Our eyes see what they are accustomed to seeing. Tacitus did not perceive the Crucifixion, although his book recorded it.

112. Only one thing is more admirable than the admirable reply of the Saxon king: that an Icelander, a man of the lineage of the vanquished, has perpetuated the reply. It is as if a Carthaginian had bequeathed to us the memory of the exploit of Regulus. Saxo Grammaticus wrote with justification in his Gesta Danorum: 'The men of Thule [Iceland] are very fond of learning and of recording the history of all peoples and they are equally pleased to reveal the excellences of others or of themselves.' Not the day when the Saxon said the words, but the day when an enemy perpetuated them, was the historic date. A date that is a prophecy of something still in the future: the day when races and nations will be cast into oblivion, and the solidarity of all mankind will be established.

117. This was the first time Remington rifles were used in the Argentine, and it tickles my fancy to think that the firm that shaves me every morning bears the same name as the one that killed my grandfather.

139. I have known uncertainty: a state unknown to the Greeks.