10 quotes
One of the heresiarchs of Uqbar had stated that mirrors and copulation are abominable, since they both multiply the numbers of man.
Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius (1940)
The metaphysicians of Tlön do not seek for the truth or even for verisimilitude, but rather for the astounding.
Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius (1940)
I owe the discovery of Uqbar to the conjunction of a mirror and an encyclopedia.
Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius (1940)
In life, he suffered from a sense of unreality, as do many Englishmen.
Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius (1940)
Hume noted for all time that Berkeley's arguments did not admit the slightest refutation nor did they cause the slightest conviction.
Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius (1940)
For one of those gnostics, the visible universe was an illusion or, more precisely, a sophism. Mirrors and fatherhood are abominable because they multiply it and extend it.
Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius (1940)
The geometry of Tlön comprises two somewhat different disciplines: the visual and the tactile. The latter corresponds to our own geometry and is subordinated to the first.
Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius (1940)
One thinker no less brilliant than the heresiarch himself, but in the orthodox tradition, advanced a most daring hypothesis. This felicitous supposition declared that there is only one Individual, and that this indivisible Individual is every one of the separate beings in the universe, and that these beings are the instruments and masks of divinity itself.
Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius (1940)
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 as a present hope, that the past has no reality other than as a present memory.
Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius (1940)
Their language and the derivations of their language — religion, letters, metaphysics — all presuppose idealism. The world for them is not a concourse of objects in space; it is a heterogeneous series of independent acts. It is successive and temporal, not spatial.
Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius (1940)