A Quote by Jorge Luis Borges

The people of Tlön are taught that the act of counting modifies the amount counted, turning indefinites into definites. The fact that several persons counting the same quantity come to the same result is for the psychologists of Tlön an example of the association of ideas or of memorization.

Jorge Luis Borges

Quote Topics

Act Amount Association Come Counted Counting Example Fact Ideas Memorization People Persons Psychologists Quantity Result Same Several Taught Turning

Quote Author

Jorge Luis Borges
Argentinian - Poet
August 24, 1899 - June 14, 1986

Nowadays, one of the churches of Tlön maintains platonically that such and such a pain, such and such a greenish-yellow colour, such and such a temperature, such and such a sound, etc., make up the only reality there is. All men, in the climactic instant of coitus, are the same man. All men who repeat one line of Shakespeare are William Shakespeare.

Jorge Luis Borges

Who's counting? It was, of course, the minority who were counting. It always is. Most of the women I know today would dearly like to use their fingers and toes for some activity more enthralling than counting. They have been counting for so long. But the peculiar problem of the new math is that every time we stop adding, somebody starts subtracting. At the very least (the advanced students will understand this) the rate of increase slows. ... The minority members of any group or profession have two answers: They can keep score or they can lose.

Ellen Goodman

Counting in octal is just like counting in decimal, if you don't use your thumbs.

Tom Lehrer

Counting in octal is just likst counting in decimal--if you don't use your thumbs.

Tom Lehrer

Music is the pleasure the human mind experiences from counting without being aware that it is counting.

Gottfried Leibniz

Counting the ways the Book of Mormon brings peace to the soul is like counting the sand on the seashore.

Neil L. Andersen

The page of my notebook was filled with many messy integrals, but all of a sudden I saw emerge a formula for counting. I had begun to calculate a quantity on the assumption that the result was a real number, but found instead that, in certain units, all the possible answers would be integers. This meant that areas and volumes cannot take any value, but come in multiples of fixed units.

Lee Smolin

One day I was counting the cats and I absent-mindedly counted myself.

Bobbie Ann Mason

Counting your blessings is a better cure for insomnia than counting sheep - you can fall asleep before you get through half of them.

Densey Clyne

I shook myself; I was dreaming. As I went to bed the words of the eighth-grade class's teacher, when the class got to Evangeline , kept echoing in my ears: "We're coming to a long poem now, boys and girls. Now don't be babies and start counting the pages." I lay there like a baby, counting the pages over and over, counting the pages.

Randall Jarrell

Tracking account planning is rather like counting a mixed batch of tropical fish. You think you see patterns, but they've all changed by the time you've finished counting.

Stephen King

I think the elections have gone well, although there is so much insecurity in Iraq. So far during the counting of ballots, there has not been a significant complaint. We have to wait to see what the outcome of the counting is.

Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani

When I did '1,2,3,4' on 'Sesame Street' they'd rewritten the song and made it about counting. At first, I balked. I was like, 'Counting to four? That's where we're going with this?' Then they sent me appearances by other people like James Blunt doing 'You're Beautiful' as 'My Triangle.'