9 Jorge Luis Borges Quotes on Language

Jorge Luis Borges quotes on language

12. El original es infiel a la traduccion.

33. The aesthetic event is something as evident, as immediate, as indefinable as love, the taste of fruit, of water. We feel poetry as we feel the closeness of a woman, or as we feel a mountain or a bay. If we feel it immediately, why dilute it with other words, which no doubt will be weaker than our feelings?

47. He transforms all concepts into incommunicable, solidified objects. To refute him is to become contaminated with unreality.

48. It is venturesome to think that a coordination of words (philosophies are nothing more than that) can resemble the universe very much. It is also venturesome to think that of all these illustrious coordinations, one of them - at least in an infinitesimal way - does not resemble the universe a bit more than the others.

56. Hume noted for all time that Berkeley's arguments did not admit the slightest refutation nor did they cause the slightest conviction. This dictum is entirely correct in its application to the earth, but entirely false in Tlon. The nations of this planet are congenitally idealist. Their language and the derivations of their language - religion, letters, metaphysics - all presuppose idealism. The world for them is not a concourse of objects in space; it is a heterogeneous series of independent acts. It is successive and temporal, not spatial.

77. In a riddle whose answer is chess, what is the only prohibited word?

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

104. Coleridge observes that all men are born Aristotelians or Platonists. The latter feel that classes, orders, and genres are realities; the former, that they are generalizations. For the latter, language is nothing but an approximative set of symbols; for the former, it is the map of the universe. The Platonist knows that the universe is somehow a cosmos, an order; that order, for the Aristotelian, can be an error or a fiction of our partial knowledge. Across the latitudes and the epochs, the two immortal antagonists change their name and language: one is Parmenides, Plato, Spinoza, Kant, Francis Bradley; the other, Heraclitus, Aristotle, Locke, Hume, William James.

107. Cabe ir mas lejos; cabe sospechar que no hay universo en el sentido organico, unificador, que tiene esa ambiciosa palabra. Si lo hay, falta conjeturar su proposito; falta conjeturar las palabras, las definiciones, las etimologias, las sinonimias, del secreto diccionario de Dios.