Notable Quotables

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What deep in our breast was thus inspired, What shy lips babbled in a quiet hour, Clumsy perhaps, and rarely as desired, Is swallowed by a savage moment’s power. And years may pass before it has acquired Its perfect form and opens like a flower. Glitter is coined to meet the moment’s rage; The genuine lives on from age to age.

- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, "Faust, Part One {Prelude in the Theatre}" (trans. Walter Kaufmann)

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With you return pictures of joyous days, Shadows that I once loved again draw near; Like a primeval tale, half lost in haze, First love and friendship also reappear; Grief is renewed, laments retrace the maze Of Life’s strange labyrinthian career, Recalling dear ones who, by fortune’s treason Robbed of fair hours, passed before my season.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “Faust”, trans. Walter Kaufmann

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Death (or reference to death) makes men precious and pathetic; their ghostliness is touching; any act they perform may be their last; there is no face that is not on the verge of blurring and fading away like the faces in a dream. Everything in the world of mortals has the value of the irrecoverable and the contingent. Among the Immortals, on the other hand, every act (every thought) is the echo of others that preceded it in the past, with no visible beginning, and the faithful presage of others that will repeat it in the future.

Jorge Luis Borges, “The Immortal”

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There is nothing very remarkable about being immortal; with the exception of mankind, all creatures are immortal, for they know nothing of death. What is divine, terrible, and incomprehensible is to know oneself immortal.

Jorge Luis Borges, “The Immortal”

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He] thought, while he stroked the cat’s black fur, that this contact was illusory, that he and the cat were separated as though by a pane of glass, because man lives in time, in successiveness, while the magical animal lives in the present, in the eternity, in the instant.

Jorge Luis Borges, “The South”

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The ascetic, ad majorem Dei gloriam, debases and mortifies the flesh; Judas debased and mortified the spirit. He renounced honour, goodness, peace, the kingdom of heaven, as others, less heroically renounce pleasure. He plotted his sins with terrible lucidity. In adultery, tenderness and abnegation often play a role; in homicide, courage; in blasphemy and profanation, a certain satanic zeal. Judas chose sins unvisited by any virtue: abuse of confidence and betrayal. He labored with titanic humility; he believed himself unworthy of being good. Paul wrote: He that glorieth, let him glory in the Lord; Judas sought hell because joy in the Lord was enough for him. He thought that happiness, like goodness, is a divine attribute, which should not be usurped by men.

Jorge Luis Borges, “Three Versions of Judas”

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Time forks perpetually into countless futures. In one of them, I am your enemy.

Jorge Luis Borges, “The Garden of the Forking Paths”

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I found it incredible that this day, lacking all omens and premonitions, should be the day of my implacable death. Despite my deceased father, despite my having been a child in a symmetrical garden in Hai Feng – was I, now, about to die? Then I reflected that all things happen to oneself, and happen precisely, precisely now. Century follows century, yet events occur only in the present; countless men in the air, on the land and sea, yet everything that truly happens, happens to me.

Jorge Luis Borges, “Garden of the Forking Paths”

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don't worry please please how many times do I have to say it? there's no way to not be who you are and where

Ikkyu Sojun (1394-1481)

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Not two not one either And the unpainted breeze in the ink painting feels cool

Ikkyu Sojun (1394-1481)

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You can't be anything but You Therefore you are the Other one you love.

Ikkyu Sojun (1391-148

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I'm pure shame What I do and what I say never the same

Ikkyu Sojun (1394-1491)

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Hear the cruel no-answer until blood drips down Beat your head against the wall of it

Ikkyu Sojun (1394-1481)

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If there's nowhere to rest at the end How can I get lost along the way?

Ikkyu Sojun (1394-1481)

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There is no intellectual exercise that is not ultimately pointless – 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.

Jorge Luis Borges, “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote”