“How soon will we accept this opportunity to be fully alive before we die? (88)”
Source: A Year to Live: How to Live This Year as If It Were Your Last
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Stephen Levine8
American poet and author 1937–2016Related quotes
“Don’t you want to be alive before you die?”
Anthony Doerr book All the Light We Cannot See
Source: All the Light We Cannot See
Uesugi Kenshin (1530–1578) Japanese daimyo
Quoted in Suzuki, Daisetz Teitaro; Zen Buddhism and Its Influence on Japanese Culture (1970); p. 188 <br class="br">Cited in Wisdom from Early Japan, The Samurai Archives, 2006-11-07 http://www.samurai-archives.com/wisdom.html, <br class="br">Cited in [Storry, Richard, October 11, 1979, Cult of the Sword, The New York Review of Books, 26, 15, ISSN 0028-7504, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/article-preview?article_id=7675, 2006-11-07] (Review of several books on the samurai of Japan.) <br class="br">Alternative: "Those who cling to life die, and those who defy death live."
“We can only die in the future, I thought; right now we are always alive.”
Amy Hempel (1951) Short story writer
Source: The Collected Stories
Alexander Pope (1688–1744) eighteenth century English poet
Letter, written in collaboration with Dr John Arbuthnot, to Jonathan Swift (December 5, 1732) upon the death of John Gay.
“We must laugh before we are happy, for fear we die before we laugh at all.”
Jean de La Bruyère book Les Caractères
Il faut rire avant que d'être heureux, de peur de mourir sans avoir ri.
Aphorism 63; Variant translation: We should laugh before being happy, for fear of dying without having laughed.
Les Caractères (1688), Du Coeur
“We must laugh before we are happy, for fear we die before we laugh at all.”
Jean De La Fontaine (1621–1695) French poet, fabulist and writer.
Jean de La Bruyère, in Du Coeur
Misattributed
