Language Quote by Jorge Luis Borges
““Gradually, the concrete enigma I labored at disturbed me less than the generic enigma of a sentence written by a god. What type of sentence (I asked myself) will an absolute mind construct? I considered that even in the human languages there is no proposition that does not imply the entire universe: to say "the tiger" is to say the tigers that begot it, the deer and turtles devoured by it, the grass on which the deer fed, the earth that was mother to the grass, the heaven that gave birth to the earth. I considered that in the language of a god every word would enunciate that infinite concatenation of facts, and not in an implicit but in an explicit manner, and not progressively but instantaneously. In time, the notion of a divine sentence seemed puerile or blasphemous. A god, I reflected, ought to utter only a single word and in that word absolute fullness. No word uttered by him can be inferior to the universe or less than the sum total of time.””
About This Quote
Source Story: “The Book of Sand” by Jorge Luis Borges, 1975
The passage reflects on the impossibility of a divine language that fully captures the universe in a single sentence, suggesting that true absolute expression would be a single, all‑encompassing word.
In simple terms: A god’s sentence would need to contain everything instantly.
Consider the limits of language.
Themes
Mood
Type
When to use this quote
- writing
- theology
- philosophical debate
- literary analysis
Key Concepts
Questions to Reflect On
- How would you convey the whole world in one word?
- Can any sentence truly be complete?
Human language cannot fully encapsulate the universe in a single statement.