top of page
.png){kind=small}
"I cannot lament the loss of a love or a friendship without meditating that one loses only what one really never had."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Detachment quotes
"It isn't so much life's problems that challenge us but the emotional turbulence stirred up while trying to deal with them. People possessing the gift of emotional detachment are lucky in that their personal problems seem far less problematic."
"People are going to break promises, and they will have every right to till the point you realize that you don't change plans based on someone else's words."
"All that is great cannot be possessed - and that is one of the most foolish things man goes on doing."
"Don't participate or allow yourself to be dragged into other people's dramas, complaints, or gossip."
"I never have been involved in politics."
"Sit still with me in the shade of these green trees, which have no weightier thought than the withering of their leaves when autumn arrives, or the stretching of their many stiff fingers into the cold sky of the passing winter. Sit still with me and meditate on how useless effort is, how alien the will, and on how our very meditation is no more useful than effort, and no more our own than the will. Meditate too on how a life that wants nothing can have no weight in the flux of things, but a life the wants everything can likewise have no weight in the flux of things, since it cannot obtain everything, and to obtain less than everything is not worthy of souls that seek the truth."
"Having less worries is what allows me to talk to beggars in the street or tell jokes at waitresses and try to make them smile. I couldn't do that before, when I had a job and was always worried about money."
"Sometimes the best solution is to stop trying to change people."
"Vitarags [the enlightened one] do not have a desire for giving or receiving charity. They are in the state of 'shuddh upyog' [pure awareness of pure soul]."
"One binds the worldly life with bad thoughts, one binds the worldly life with good thoughts. With the absence of thoughts (avichaar) there is moksha [liberation]."
Explore more quotes by Jorge Luis Borges
"The gods weave misfortunes for men, so that the generations to come will have something to sing about. Mallarmé repeats, less beautifully, what Homer said; "tout aboutit en un livre, everything ends up in a book. The Greeks speak of generations that will sing; Mallarmé speaks of an object, of a thing among things, a book. But the idea is the same; the idea that we are made for art, we are made for memory, we are made for poetry, or perhaps we are made for oblivion. But something remains, and that something is history or poetry, which are not essentially different."
"Of all man's instruments, the most wondrous, no doubt, is the book. The other instruments are extensions of his body. The microscope, the telescope, are extensions of his sight; the telephone is the extension of his voice; then we have the plow and the sword, extensions of the arm. But the book is something else altogether: the book is an extension of memory and imagination."
"And so, as I sleep, some dream beguiles me, and suddenly I know I dream.Then I think: this is a dream, a pure diversion of my will; now that I have unlimited power, I am going to create a tiger.Oh incompetence! Never do my dreams engender the wild beast I longed for.The tiger indeed appears, but stuffed or flimsy, or with impure variations of shape, or of an implausible size, or all too fleeting, or with a touch of the dog or bird."
"From my weakness, I drew strength that never left me."
"I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities I have visited."
"In the order of literature, as in others, there is no act that is not the coronation of an infinite series of causes and the source of an infinite series of effects."
"And yet, and yet, Denying temporal succession, denying the self, denying the astronomical universe, are apparent desperations and secret consolations. Our destiny, is not frightful by being unreal; it is frightful because it is irreversible and iron-clad. 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."
"We spend our lives waiting for our book and it never comes."
"We are ignorant of the meaning of the dragon in the same way that we are ignorant of the meaning of the universe; but there is something in the dragon's image that fits man's imagination, and this accounts for the dragon's appearance in different places and periods."
bottom of page