Quotes About Philosophy

It is a laborious madness and an impoverishing one, the madness of composing vast books - setting out in five hundred pages an idea that can be perfectly related orally in five minutes. The better way to go about it is to pretend that those books already exist, and offer a summary, a commentary on them. (From the Introduction of 1941's The Garden of Forking Paths)

God must not engage in theology. The writer must not destroy by human reasonings the faith that art requires of us.

When I wake up, I wake to something worse. It's the astonishment of being myself

Captivated by its discipline, humanity forgets and goes on forgetting that it is the discipline of chess players, not of angels.

It must be that I am not made to be a dead man, but these places and this discussion seem like a dream, and not a dream dreamed by me but by someone else still to be born.

We forget that we are all dead men conversing with dead men.

I know of a wild region whose librarians repudiate the vain superstitious custom of seeking any sense in books and compare it to looking for meaning in dreams or in the chaotic lines of one's hands . . . They admit that the inventors of writing imitated the twenty-five natural symbols, but they maintain that this application is accidental and that books in themselves mean nothing. This opinion - we shall see - is not altogether false.

To speak is to fall into tautology.

They seek neither truth nor likelihood; they seek astonishment. They think metaphysics is a branch of the literature of fantasy

Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire. The world, unfortunately, is real; I, unfortunately, am Borges.

All theories are legitimate, no matter. What matters is what you do with them.

I know what the Greeks do not know, incertitude.

How can we manage to illuminate the pathos of our lives?

La muerte es una vida vivida. La vida es una muerte que viene.

Every cultivated man is a theologian, and faith is not a requisite.

What is a book? A book seems, like a picture, to be a living being; and yet if we ask it something, it does not answer. Then we see that it is dead.In order to make the book into a living thing, he invented—happily for us—the Platonic dialogue, which forestalls the reader's doubts and questions.

Time is living me.

I am god, I am hero, I am philosopher, I am demon and I am world, which is a tedious way of saying that I do not exist.

zaman beni sürükleyen bir nehir, ama nehir benim; beni parçalayan bir kaplan, ama kaplan benim; beni tüketen bir ateÅŸ, ama ateÅŸ benim; evren, ne yaz?k ki gerçek; ben, ne yaz?k ki, borges'im

But let no one imagine that we were mere ascetics. There is no more complex pleasure than thought, and it was to thought that we delivered ourselves over.

There is no intellectual exercise that is not ultimately pointless. A philosophical doctrine is, at first, a plausible description of the universe; the years go by, and it is a mere chapter -- if not a paragraph or proper noun -- in the history of philosophy.

It is a fact, indeed, that most of the great teachers of mankind have been not writers but speakers. Think of Pythagoras, Christ, Socrates, the Buddha, and so on. And since I have spoken of Socrates, I would like to say something about Plato. I remember Bernard Shaw said that Plato was the dramatist who invented Socrates

Pensar, analizar, inventar no son actos anómalos, son la normal respiración de la inteligencia. Glorificar el ocasional cumplimiento de esa función, atesorar antiguos y ajenos pensamientos, recordar con incrédulo estupor lo que el doctor universalis pensó, es confesar nuestra languidez o nuestra barbarie. Todo hombre debe ser capaz de todas las ideas y entiendo que en el porvenir lo será.

The metaphysicians of Tlön are not looking for truth, nor even for an approximation of it; they are after a kind of amazement.