“If something is worrying you, always do something about it. It doesn’t have to be the big thing that will make it disappear. It can be any small thing. But the positive effect it will have on you will be enormous.”
Source: 100 Ways to Motivate Yourself: Change Your Life Forever
“The next time you’re worried about something, ask yourself, 'What small thing can I do right now?' Then do it. Remember not to ask, 'What could I possibly do to make this whole thing go away?' That question does not get you into action at all.”
Source: 100 Ways to Motivate Yourself: Change Your Life Forever
“When we leave this world, we will ask ourselves one question: What’s different? What’s different because I was here? And the answer to that question will be the difference that we made.”
Source: 100 Ways to Motivate Yourself: Change Your Life Forever
“It is love. I will have to run or hide.
The walls of its prison rise up, as in a twisted dream. The beautiful mask has changed, but as always it is the one. Of what use are my talismans: the literary exercises, the vague erudition, the knowledge of words used by the harsh North to sing its seas and swords, the temperate friendship, the galleries of the Library, the common things, the habits, the young love of my mother, the militant shadow of my dead, the timeless night, the taste of dreams?
Being with you or being without you is the measure of my time.
Now the pitcher breaks about the spring, now the man arises to the sound of birds, now those that watch at the windows have gone dark, but the darkness has brought no peace.
It, I know, is love: the anxiety and the relief at hearing your voice, the expectation and the memory, the horror of living in succession.
It is love with its mythologies, with its tiny useless magics.
There exists a corner that I dare not cross.
Now the armies confine me, the hordes.
(This room is unreal; she has not seen it.)
The name of a woman gives me away.
A woman hurts me in all of my body.”
“When you boil Christianity down to its core, you might not get an answer to every struggle and tragedy, but you do get unfathomable love and a beautiful hope for a greater future.”
Source: More than Questions
“Bazen ölsem diyorum.
sahilde güneşlenmeye uzanır gibi,
uzanıp sıcak kumlara,
kum olsam.
Unutsa sevdiklerim,
hiç yaşamamışım gibi.
Ben de unutsam,
kaybolsam.”
“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”
Source: The Aleph and Other Stories
“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.”
Source: Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings
“zaman beni sürükleyen bir nehir, ama nehir benim;
beni parçalayan bir kaplan, ama kaplan benim;
beni tüketen bir ateş, ama ateş benim;
evren, ne yazık ki gerçek;
ben, ne yazık ki, borges'im”
Source: The Book of Sand and Shakespeare's Memory
“At a certain point talk about 'essence' and 'oneness' and the universal becomes more tautological than inquisitive.”
Source: Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays