Quotes by Argentinian Authors - Page 5

From my weakness, I drew strength that never left me.
Jorge Luis Borges
When will women become civilized enough to stop mistreating men? When will they cease from training their lovers to become providers, merely because they have the power to do so?As long as they continue as they are, men have no alternative to polygamy.
Esther Vilar
I was so drunk I couldn't tell a vagina from a bullet hole
Andrés Aloi
Instead of imposing new obligations, (Christians) should appear as people who wish to share their joy, who point to a horizon of beauty and who invite others to a delicious banquet.
Pope Francis
La Maga did not know that my kisses were like eyes which began to open up beyond her, and that I went along outside as if I saw a different concept of the world, the dizzy pilot of a black prow which cut the water of time and negated it.
Julio Cortázar
Because no one has more thirst for earth, for blood, and for ferocious sexuality than the creatures who inhabit cold mirrors
Alejandra Pizarnik
I do not believe that a dream should necessarily be taken for reality, or reality for madness.
Adolfo Bioy Casares
I had a real life completely separate from beliefs, from the common reality made up of shared beliefs...
César Aira
I suspected once that any human life, however intricate and full it might be, consisted in reality of one moment: the moment when a man knows for all time who he is.
Jorge Luis Borges
Perhaps he was probing the enigma of why men fall in love with their dreams, which are then so destroyed by harsh realities that their dreamers become cuckolded by their own illusions. Perhaps...
Juan Filloy
Every novel is an ideal plane inserted into the realm of reality.
Jorge Luis Borges
In the twentieth century nothing can better cure the anthropocentrism that is the author of all our ills than to cast ourselves into the physics of the infinitely large (or the infinitely small).
Julio Cortázar
All established order forms a line of resistance against the threat of rupture and places its meager forces at the service of continuity. That everything should continue as usual is the bourgeois standard of a reality that is indeed bourgeois precisely because it is a standard.
Julio Cortázar
Another school declares that all time has already transpired and that our life is only the crepuscular and no doubt falsified and mutilated memory or reflection of an irrecoverable process.
Jorge Luis Borges
Reality is not always probable, or likely.
Jorge Luis Borges
Life is an inside job and it is much easier if we let it go and get out of our own way!
Mabel Katz
He who does not know how to believe, should not know.
Antonio Porchia
Saint John, in a moment of confusion, tells us not to love the world because "all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life,is not of the Father, but is of the world." This injunction is at best a paradox. Our humble and astonishing inheritance is the world and only the world, whose existence we constantly test (and prove) by telling ourselves stories about it. The suspicion that we and the world are made in the image of something wonderfully and chaotically coherent far beyond our grasp, of which we are also part; the hope that our exploded cosmos and we, its stardust, have an ineffable meaning and method; the delight in retelling the old metaphor of the world as a book we read and in which we too are read; the conceit that what we can know of reality is an imagination made of language — all this finds its material manifestation in that self-portrait we call a library. And our love for it, and our lust to see more of it, and our pride in its accomplishments as we wander through shelves full of books that promise more and more delights, are among our happiest, most moving proofs of possessing, in spite of all the miseries and sorrows of this life, a more intimate, consolatory, perhaps redeeming faith in a method behind the madness than any jealous deity could wish upon us.
Alberto Manguel
The world encyclopedia, the universal library, exists, and it is the world itself.
Alberto Manguel
If the library in the morning suggests an echo of the severe and reasonable wishful order of the world, the library at night seems to rejoice in the world's essential, joyful muddle.
Alberto Manguel
Power consists in making oneself the goal of another person's social instincts, without seeking to satisfy one's own social instincts through him. The other then does everything one asks. Powerlessness consists in wanting or having to satisfy one's social instincts through another person whose social instincts one has not succeeded in concentrating on oneself - one then does everything the other asks.
Esther Vilar
A man who wants to gain power over a woman must follow the example of women and condition his sex drive. If he succeeds in becoming as cold as she, she can no longer bait him with sex into the role of provider. At most she could offer herself as an equal sex partner, as dependent on him as he is on her. If men could abstain from sex at judicious intervals they might even succeed in normalizing the female sex drive - even make women desire them more than the other way around.
Esther Vilar
Power engenders the evil-minded who ill-treat the needy in all parts of the world.
Sylvia Iparraguirre
They believe, along the lines of social networks, that love can be connected or disconnected at the whim of the consumer, and the relationship quickly "blocked". We treat affective relationships the way we treat material objects and the environment : everything is disposable; everyone uses and throws away, takes and breaks, exploits and squeezes to the last drop. Then, goodbye.
Pope Francis
Freedom of choice makes it possible to plan our lives and to make the most of ourselves. Yet if this freedom lacks noble goals or personal discipline, it degenerates into an inability to give oneself generously to others.
Pope Francis
A child deserves to be born of that love, and not by any other means, for “he or she is not something owed to one, but is a gift”, which is “the fruit of the specific act of the conjugal love of the parents”. This is the case because, “according to the order of creation, conjugal love between a man and a woman, and the transmission of life are ordered to each other (cf. Gen 1:27-28). Thus the Creator made man and woman share in the work of his creation and, at the same time, made them instruments of his love, entrusting to them the responsibility for the future of mankind, through the transmission of human life”.
Pope Francis
It is one thing to be understanding of human weakness and the complexities of life, and another to accept ideologies that attempt to sunder what are inseparable aspects of reality. Let us not fall into the sin of trying to replace the Creator. We are creatures, and not omnipotent. Creation is prior to us and must be received as a gift. At the same time, we are called to protect our humanity, and this means, in the first place, accepting it and respecting it as it was created.
Pope Francis
Narcissism makes people incapable of looking beyond themselves, beyond their own desires and needs.
Pope Francis
Only the family, society's smallest unit, can change and yet maintain enough continuity to rear children who will not be "strangers in a strange land," who will be rooted firmly enough to grow and adapt.
Salvador Minuchin
The fantastic breaks the crust of appearance … something grabs us by the shoulders to throw us outside ourselves. I have always known that the big surprises await us where we have learned to be surprised by nothing, that is, where we are not shocked by ruptures in the order.
Julio Cortázar
We are as ignorant of the meaning of the dragon as we are of the meaning of the universe.
Jorge Luis Borges
A full heart has room for everything and empty heart has room for nothing. Who understands?
Antonio Porchia
Tearing money is an impiety, like throwing away bread.
Jorge Luis Borges
There is an hour of the afternoon when the plain is on the verge of saying something. It never says, or perhaps it says it infinitely, or perhaps we do not understand it, or we understand it and it is untranslatable as music.
Jorge Luis Borges
...only the exclusive and indissoluble union between a man and a woman has a plenary role to play in society as a stable commitment that bears fruit in new life.
Pope Francis
It is in the very nature of conjugal love to be definitive. The lasting union expressed by the marriage vows is more than a formality or a traditional formula; it is rooted in the natural inclinations of the human person. For believers, it is also a covenant before God that calls for fidelity.
Pope Francis
Natural marriage, therefore, is fully understood in the light of its fulfilment in the sacrament of Matrimony: only in contemplating Christ does a person come to know the deepest truth about human relationships.
Pope Francis
When the search for pleasure becomes obsessive, it holds us in thrall and keeps us from experiencing other satisfactions. Joy, on the other hand, increases our pleasure and helps us find fulfilment in any number of things, even at those times of life when physical pleasure has ebbed.
Pope Francis
Our lives go by in our own minds. The war is inside our heads and only we can return the peace. It is essential to remember that in one sense we are always right. If we say, we can, we can. If we say we cannot, that’s how it is, we cannot.
Mabel Katz
No amount of 'peace-building' will be able to last, nor will harmony and happiness be attained, in a society that ignores, pushes to the margins, or excludes a part of itself; it loses something essential. We must never, never allow the throwaway culture to enter our hearts! ... No one is disposable!
Pope Francis
What need does the earth have of us?
Pope Francis
We need to remember and remind ourselves where we come from, what we are, our nothingness.
Pope Francis
Historical truth, for him, is not what has happened; it is what we judge to have happened.
Jorge Luis Borges
Is it better to have bronze than copper and tin separately? Is this the marker of some historic advance?
Claudia Piñeiro
A bird flashed across the empty sky. A cart immobile on the horizon, like a midday star. How could a plain like this be remade? Yet someone would, no doubt, attempt to repeat their journey, sooner or later. This thought made them feel they should bet at once very careful and very daring: careful not to make a mistake that would render the repetition impossible; daring, so that the journey would be worth repeating, like an adventure.
César Aira
The expression 'there is nothing like the good old days' does not mean that fewer bad things happened before, but fortunately, that people tend to forget about them.
Ernesto Sabato
However readers make a book theirs, the end is that book and reader become one. The world that is a book is devoured by a reader who is a letter in the world's text; thus a circular metaphor is created for the endlessness of reading. We are what we read. The process by which the circle is completed is not, Whitman argued, merely an intellectual one; we read intellectually on a superficial level, grasping certain meanings and conscious of certain facts, but at the same time, invisibly, unconsciously, text and reader become intertwined, creating new levels of meaning, so that every time we cause the text to yield something by ingesting it, simultaneously something else is born beneath it that we haven't yet grasped. That is why - as Whitman believed, rewriting and re-editing his poems over and over again - no reading can ever be definitive.
Alberto Manguel
Reading . . . is an activity subsequent to writing: more resigned, more civil, more intellectual.
Jorge Luis Borges
As centuries of dictators have known, an illiterate crowd is the easiest to rule; since the craft of reading cannot be untaught once it has been acquired, the second-best recourse is to limit its scope.
Alberto Manguel
All these are readers, and their gestures, their craft, the pleasure, the responsibility and the power they derive from reading, are common with mine. I am not alone.
Alberto Manguel
But a reader's ambition knows no bounds.
Alberto Manguel
I sometimes longed for someone who, like me, had not adjusted perfectly with his age, and such a person was hard to find; but I soon discovered cats, in which I could imagine a condition like mine, and books, where I found it quite often.
Julio Cortázar
Dignity is not a symbol bestowed on man, nor does the word itself possess force. Man's dignity is a force and the only modus vivendi by which man and his history survive. When mid-twentieth century Germany did not let man live and die with this right, man became an animal. No matter how technologically advanced or sophisticated, when man negates this divine right, he not only becomes self-destructive, but castrates his history and poisons our future. This is what 'The Nazi Drawings' are about.
Mauricio Lasansky
The best form of saying is being
Ernesto Che Guevara
In my soul the afternoon grows wider and I reflect.
Jorge Luis Borges
Mercy will always be greater than any sin, no one can put a limit on the love of the all-forgiving God. Just by looking at him, just raising our eyes from ourselves and our wounds, we leave an opening for the action of his grace. Jesus performs miracles with our sins, with what we are, with our nothingness, with our wretchedness.
Pope Francis
Families who lovingly accept the difficult trial of a child with special needs are greatly to be admired. They render the Church and society an invaluable witness of faithfulness to the gift of life. In these situations, the family can discover, together with the Christian community, new approaches, new ways of acting, a different way of understanding and identifying with others, by welcoming and caring for the mystery of the frailty of human life. People with disabilities are a gift for the family and an opportunity to grow in love, mutual aid and unity… If the family, in the light of the faith, accepts the presence of persons with special needs, they will be able to recognize and ensure the quality and value of every human life, with its proper needs, rights and opportunities.
Pope Francis
The path to joy and spiritual fulfilment requires the courage to change and grow.
A.G. Roemmers
Really, there's only one way of changing the world, and that's by changing yourself.
A.G. Roemmers
—And what's so bad about being soft like a woman? Why is it men or whoever, some poor bastard, some queen, can't be sensitive, too, if he's got a mind to? —I don't know, but sometimes that kind of behavior can get in a man's way.—When? When it comes to torturing?”—No, when it comes to being finished with the torturers.”—But if men acted like women there wouldn't be anymore torturers.
Manuel Puig