“I have known that thing the Greeks knew not – uncertainty.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

"The Lottery in Babylon"; tr. Andrew Hurley, Collected Fictions (1998)
The Garden of Forking Paths (1942)
Variant: I have known uncertainty: a state unknown to the Greeks.

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "I have known that thing the Greeks knew not – uncertainty." by Jorge Luis Borges?

Jorge Luis Borges 213

Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator… 1899–1986

Related quotes

“I was a new person then, I knew things I had not known before, I knew things that you can know only if you have been through what I had just been through.”

Jamaica Kincaid (1949) Antiguan-American novelist, essayist, gardener, and gardening writer

Source: The Autobiography of My Mother

“I have turned my entire attention to Greek. The first thing I shall do, as soon as the money arrives, is to buy some Greek authors; after that, I shall buy clothes.”
Ad Graecas literas totum animum applicui; statimque ut pecuniam accepero, Graecos primum autores, deinde vestes emam.

Desiderius Erasmus (1466–1536) Dutch Renaissance humanist, Catholic priest, and theologian

Letter to Jacob Batt (12 April 1500); Collected Works of Erasmus Vol 1 (1974)
Variant translation: When I get a little money I buy books; and if any is left I buy food and clothes.

“There is no such uncertainty as a sure thing.”

Robert Burns (1759–1796) Scottish poet and lyricist

Reported as attributed to Burns but unverified in Suzy Platt (ed.), Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations Requested from the Congressional Research Service (Washington, DC : Library of Congress 1989) http://www.bartleby.com/73/172.html
Disputed
Source: Collected Poems of Robert Burns

“I have always known a thing before it happens.”

Amy Tan The Joy Luck Club

The Joy Luck Club (1989), Ch. 14, pg. 243

“It might have meant something, or it might not have. That was the thing about uncertainty, you were never sure.”

Robert Sheckley book Hunter/Victim

Source: Hunter/Victim (1988), Chapter 18 (p. 100)

“I knew that what I was seeking to discover was a thing I'd always known. That all courage was a form of constancy. That it was always himself that the coward abandoned first. After this all other betrayals came easily.”

Cormac McCarthy book All the Pretty Horses

Variant: Long before morning I knew that what I was seeking to discover was a thing I'd always known. That all courage was a form of constancy. That it is always himself that the coward abandoned first. After this all other betrayals come easily.
Source: All the Pretty Horses

“The most precious thing in life is its uncertainty.”

Yoshida Kenkō (1283–1350) japanese writer

Essays in Idleness (1967 Columbia University Press, Trns: Donald Keene)
Context: If man were never to fade away like the dews of Adashino never to vanish like the smoke over Toribeyama, but lingered on forever in the world, how things would lose their power to move us! The most precious thing in life is its uncertainty. Consider living creatures- none lives so long a man. The May fly waits not for the evening, the summer cicada knows neither spring nor autumn. What a wonderfully unhurried feeling it is to live even even a single year in perfect serenity.