Life & Wisdom Quote by Jorge Luis Borges

Infinity, in Borges's hands, isn't a romantic horizon. It's acid. By demoting “Evil” to a “limited empire” - a jurisdictional problem within ethics - he frames morality as something humans can at least litigate. You can argue, punish, repent. The infinite is worse because it doesn’t play by those rules. It isn’t a villain with motives; it’s a solvent that dissolves motives, categories, even the comfort of boundaries.

The sentence works like a trapdoor: it begins with the familiar architecture of a moral warning, then drops you into metaphysics. Borges’s sly move is to treat infinity as the true corrupter, because it erodes the very conditions that make meaning possible. Ethics depends on scale: decisions, consequences, limits, an “I” who chooses. The infinite scrambles scale. In an endless library, a single book becomes both priceless and negligible. In an infinite time, any act is both irreversible and statistically inevitable. That’s not just unsettling; it’s a direct attack on narrative, on the human need to total things up.

Context matters: Borges spent his career staging collisions between rational systems and bottomless immensities - labyrinths, mirrors, Alephs, libraries that contain everything and therefore annihilate significance. Writing in a century that saw totalizing ideologies and mechanized catastrophe, he distrusted any concept that pretends to be complete. The subtext is a warning to intellectual ambition itself: the moment you reach for the infinite, you don’t expand understanding; you invite a beautiful, indifferent force that makes understanding impossible.