Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius Quotes

“Mirrors and copulation are abominable, since they both multiply the numbers of men.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius

“The metaphysicians of Tlön are not looking for truth, nor even for an approximation of it; they are after a kind of amazement.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius

“Centuries and centuries of idealism have not failed to influence reality”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius

“The critics often invent authors; they select two dissimilar works - the Tao Te Ching and the 1001 Nights, say - attribute them to the same writer and then determine most scrupulously the psychology of this interesting homme de lettres...”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius

“I owe the discovery of Uqbar to the conjunction of a mirror and an encyclopedia.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius

“Enchanted by its rigour, humanity forgets over and again that it is a rigour of chess masters, not of angels”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius

“For one of those gnostics, the visible universe was an illusion or (more precisely) a sophism. Mirrors and fathers are abominable because they multiply and disseminate that universe.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius

“From the remote depths of the corridor, the mirror spied on us. We discovered (such a discovery is inevitable in the late hour of the night) that mirrors have something monstrous about them.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius

“Mirrors and copulation are abominable, for they multiply the number of mankind”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius

“The metaphysicians of Tlön are not looking for truth or even an approximation to it: they are after a kind of amazement. They consider metaphysics a branch of fantastic literature.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius

“… a compass vibrated mysteriously… the letters around its edge corresponded to one of the alphabets of Tlön. Such was the first intrusion of this fantastic world into the world of reality.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius

“Buckley did not believe in God, but he wanted to demonstrate to this non-existent God that mortal man was capable of conceiving a world.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius

“Things become duplicated in Tlön; they also tend to become effaced and lose their details when they are forgotten. A classic example is the doorway which survived so long as it was visited by a beggar and disappeared at his death.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius

“… while we sleep here, we are awake elsewhere and that in this way every man is two men.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius

“One of the schools of Tlön goes so far as to negate time: it reasons that the present is indefinite, that the future has no reality other than present hope, that the past has no reality other than as a present memory.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius

“mirrors and copulation are abominable because they increase the number of men”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius

“Os metafísicos de Tlön não buscam a verdade nem sequer a verossimilhança: buscam o assombro. Julgam que a metafísica é um ramo da literatura fantástica. [...] Tlön pode ser um labirinto, mas é um labirinto urdido por homens, um labirinto destinado a ser decifrado pelos homens. [...] Encantada com seu rigor, a humanidade esquece e torna a esquecer que é um rigor de enxadristas, não de anjos.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius

“A book which does not contain its counterbook is considered incomplete.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius