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"It's a shame that we have to choose between two such second-rate countries as the USSR and the USA."
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Exlpore more Shame quotes
"Well it's because the record companies are pumping away with their commercial stuff. I think it's a shame."
"Shame weakens us. It can make us frightened to take on something new. We start to withdraw from whatever might give us pleasure, self-esteem, or a sense of our value."
"The shame that tormented me was all the more corrosive for having no very clear origin: I didn't know why I felt so tainted, and worthless, and wrong-only that I did, and whenever I looked up from my books I was swamped by slimy waters rushing in from all sides."
"We would not be ashamed of doing some of the things we do in private, if the number of sane human beings who do them in public were large enough."
"I felt ashamed.""But of what? Psyche, they hadn't stripped you naked or anything?""No, no, Maia. Ashamed of looking like a mortal -- of being a mortal.""But how could you help that?""Don't you think the things people are most ashamed of are things they can't help?"
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."
"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."
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