Life & Wisdom Quote by Jorge Luis Borges

Procrastination, in Borges's hands, isn’t a bad habit; it’s a metaphysical tell. The line starts with a familiar human comedy - postponing whatever can be postponed - then swerves into the vertigo behind it: the suspicion that delay isn’t just laziness but an unconscious wager on endless time. By proposing that “deep down” we think we’re immortal, Borges smuggles a heretical psychology into everyday behavior. We act as if deadlines are negotiable because, at some subterranean level, we treat life itself as negotiable.

The second clause sharpens the irony into something almost cruel. “Sooner or later all men will do and know all things” sounds like a utopian promise, but Borges frames it as a seductive lie we tell ourselves to justify deferral. It’s the fantasy of infinite extension: every unread book becomes readable, every unlived life livable, every moral reckoning delayable. The phrasing “all men” universalizes the delusion, making it less a personal flaw than a species-wide myth.

Context matters: Borges built a career out of infinity traps - labyrinths, libraries containing every book, recursive mirrors, time that forks. Against that backdrop, immortality isn’t comfort; it’s a narrative virus that erases urgency. The subtext is bleakly practical: belief in limitless possibility, even as a half-conscious feeling, corrodes commitment. If you’re “going to” become everything eventually, you never have to become anything now.