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Quote by Jorge Luis Borges

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Jorge Luis Borges
Jorge Luis Borges

Jorge Luis Borges was an Argentine writer, poet, and literary critic. His works are known for their unique fantasy and philosophical thinking, which have had a profound impact on 20th-century literature. more

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“Our penultimate lot, ladies and gentlemen, exudes an air of mystical melancholy. The tooth itself is crocodilian, but its aura is almost angelic. Note the curve; it is like a wing in ascent. Its owner, Mr. Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges, was a man of average height. His short, thin legs supported a torso, which was at once solid and svelte. His head was the size of a small coconut, and he had a slender, flexible neck. He was a pantheist.”

“There's not one religion but two, one is commercial religion, rooted in fear, prejudice and bigotry, and the other is lived religion, rooted in kindness and inclusivity - the atheist and the believer drink from the same water, breathe the same air, eat the same food - mother nature, the actual origin of life, doesn't segregate between believer and nonbeliever, it's only the savages who do that.”

“Your cells are a country of ten thousand trillion citizens, each devoted in some intensively specific way to your overall well-being. There isn’t a thing they don’t do for you. They let you feel pleasure and form thoughts. They enable you to stand and stretch and caper. When you eat, they extract the nutrients, distribute the energy, and carry off the wastes - all those things you learned about in junior high school biology - but they also remember to make you hungry in the first place and reward you with a feeling of well-being afterward so that you won’t forget to eat again. They keep your hair growing, your ears waxed, your brain quietly purring. They manage every corner of your being. They will jump to your defence the instant you are threatened. They will unhesitatingly die for you - billions of them do so daily. And not once in all your years have you thanked even one of them.”

“your atoms don't actually care about you - indeed, don't even know that you are there. They don't even know that they are there. They are mindless particles, after all and not even themselves alive. (It is a slightly arresting notion that if you were to pick yourself apart with tweezers, one atom at a time, you would produce a mound of fine atomic dust, none of which would have ever been alive but all of which had once been you.)”

“you and I having this conversation right now, and anyone reading the magazine, is part of an unbroken chain of communication – an interpretive process, with messages being exchanged millions of times per second, between cells and even organelles within cells, that stretches back, totally unbroken, 3.7 billion years. That’s 3.7 billion years of conversation going on between living structures in order to allow us to be here today. If there had ever been a break, even for a second, you wouldn’t be here. If you were looking for a metaphysical thought to give you a sense of overwhelming wonder, all you need is to meditate for a moment on the fact that you are part of this unbroken exchange, a conversation that goes all the way back to the puddle, or the clay-like substrate, that all life emerged from.”