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The certainty that everything has already been written annuls us, or renders us phantasmal.
Jorge Luis Borges
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Interpretation

What this quote means

This quote reflects on the ideas of predetermination and existentialism, suggesting that if everything is preordained, our existence feels illusory.

Jorge Luis Borges explores the tension between fate and free will, posing that the belief that our lives and actions are already scripted can lead to a feeling of nullity or insignificance. It suggests that if we are merely characters in a predetermined narrative, our individual experiences and choices become questionable, leading us to feel ghost-like in our own existence.

Themes

FateFree WillExistencePhilosophyPredetermination

In practice

Example use cases

In a discussion about the meaning of life, this quote can be referenced to challenge the idea of destiny.

More from Jorge Luis Borges

You can't measure time by days, the way you measure money by dollars and cents, because dollars are all the same while every day is different and maybe every hour as well.
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To say good-bye is to deny separation; it is to say Today we play at going our own ways, but we'll see each other tomorrow. Men invented farewells because they somehow knew themselves to be immortal, even while seeing themselves as contingent and ephemeral.
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The execution was set for the 29th of March, at nine in the morning. This delay was due to a desire on the part of the authorities to act slowly and impersonally, in the manner of planets or vegetables.
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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.
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A man sets out to draw the world. As the years go by, he peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, instruments, stars, horses, and individuals. A short time before he dies, he discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines traces the lineaments of his own face.
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Let neither tear nor reproach besmirch this declaration of the mastery of God who, with magnificent irony, granted me both the gift of books and the night.
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