Quotessence
Home / Books / The Aleph and Other Stories

The Aleph and Other Stories

Book by Jorge Luis Borges · 13 quotes · Jorge Luis Borges, El Aleph, Money

Filter quotes by topic

AllJorge Luis BorgesEl AlephMoneyAlephBooksComplexityComplexity Of LifeComplexity Of The UniverseCurrencyDreamDreamingFree WillInceptionLa Escritura Del DiosMisterioMorirMúsicaNaturalezaPersonal LibraryPleasure

The Aleph and Other Stories Quotes

“Sleepless, possessed, almost happy, I reflected that there is nothing less material than money, since any coin (a twenty centavo piece, for instance) is, in truth, a panoply of all possible futures. Money is abstract, I said over and over, money is future time. It can be an evening just outside the city, or a Brahms melody, or maps, or chess, or coffee, or the words of Epictetus, which teach the contempt of gold; it is a Proteus more changeable than the Proteus of the Isle of Pharos. It is unforeseeable time, Bergsonian time, not the hard, solid time of Islam or the Portico. Adherents of determinism deny that in the world there is only one possible event, ed ist an event which could have happened; a coin symbolizes our free will. (I did not suspect that these “thoughts” were an artifice against the Zahir and a first manifestation of a demoniacal power.) After long and tenacious musings, I at last fell asleep, but I dreamed that I was the pile of coins guarded by a gryphon.”

MoneyFree WillCurrencyPossibilities
Book:The Aleph and Other Stories
Create image

“One day or one night—between my days and nights, what difference can there be?—I dreamed that there was a grain of sand on the floor of my cell. Unconcerned, I went back to sleep; I dreamed that I woke up and there were two grains of sand. Again I slept; I dreamed that now there were three. Thus the grains of sand multiplied, little by little, until they filled the cell and I was dying beneath that hemisphere of sand. I realized that I was dreaming; with a vast effort I woke myself. But waking up was useless—I was suffocated by the countless sand. Someone said to me: You have wakened not out of sleep, but into a prior dream, and that dream lies within another, and so on, to infinity, which is the number of the grains of sand. The path that you are to take is endless, and you will die before you have truly awakened. I felt lost. The sand crushed my mouth, but I cried out: I cannot be killed by sand that I dream —nor is there any such thing as a dream within a dream. — Jorge Luis Borges, The Writing of the God”

DreamDreamingShort StoriesInceptionJorge Luis BorgesAlephLa Escritura Del Dios
Book:The Aleph and Other Stories
Create image

“Todos los hechos pueden ocurrirle a un hombre, desde el instante de su nacimiento hasta el de su muerte, han sido prefijados por el. Asi, toda negligencia es deliberada, todo casual encuentro una cita, toda humillacion una penitencia, todo fracaso una misteriosa victoria, toda muerte un suicidio. No hay consuelo mas habil que el pensamiento de que hemos elegido nuestras desdichas.”

Jorge Luis BorgesEl Aleph
Book:The Aleph and Other Stories
Create image