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When I wake up, I wake to something worse. It’s the astonishment of being myself
Jorge Luis Borges
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Interpretation

What this quote means

The quote reflects on the struggle of self-awareness and the burden of existence.

In this quote, Jorge Luis Borges expresses a profound sense of astonishment and perhaps discomfort in recognizing one's own identity each day. The phrase suggests that waking up brings not just the beginning of a new day, but also an awareness of the complexities and challenges of being who we are, highlighting the weight of self-existence.

Themes

SelfExistenceIdentityAstonishmentAwareness

In practice

Example use cases

This quote could be used in a philosophy class discussion about self-awareness.

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.
Jorge Luis BorgesRead
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.
Jorge Luis BorgesRead

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