“They proved that if you quit smoking, it will prolong your life. What they haven't proved is that a prolonged life is a good thing. I haven't seen the stats on that yet.”
Dark Poet (1991)
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Bill Hicks 100
American comedian 1961–1994Related quotes
Quoted in Oxford Dictionary of Medical Quotations by Peter McDonald (Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 9 https://books.google.it/books?id=MuTnCwAAQBAJ&pg=PA9.
Attributed
“Time will prolong time, and life will serve life.”
The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), The Absurd Man
Context: Time will prolong time, and life will serve life. In this field that is both limited and bulging with possibilities, everything to himself, except his lucidity, seems unforeseeable to him. What rule, then, could emanate from that unreasonable order? The only truth that might seem instructive to him is not formal: it comes to life and unfolds in men. The absurd mind cannot so much expect ethical rules at the end of its reasoning as, rather, illustrations and the breath of human lives.
“But if you think that life can be prolonged by the breath of mortal fame, yet when the slow time robs you of this too, then there awaits you but a second death.”
Quodsi putatis longius vitam trahi
mortalis aura nominis,
cum sera vobis rapiet hoc etiam dies
iam vos secunda mors manet.
Poem VII, lines 23-26; translation by W. V. Cooper
The Consolation of Philosophy · De Consolatione Philosophiae, Book II
Variant transcription from "Death of a Genius" in Life Magazine: "Certainly there are things worth believing. I believe in the brotherhood of man and the uniqueness of the individual. But if you ask me to prove what I believe, I can't. You know them to be true but you could spend a whole lifetime without being able to prove them. The mind can proceed only so far upon what it knows and can prove. There comes a point where the mind takes a leap—call it intuition or what you will—and comes out upon a higher plane of knowledge, but can never prove how it got there. All great discoveries have involved such a leap."
Unsourced variant: "The intellect has little to do on the road to discovery. There comes a leap in consciousness, call it intuition or what you will, and the solution comes to you and you do not know how or why. All great discoveries are made in this way." The earliest published version of this variant appears to be The Human Side of Scientists by Ralph Edward Oesper (1975), p. 58 http://books.google.com/books?id=-J0cAQAAIAAJ&q=%22solution+comes+to+you+and+you+do+not+know%22&dq=%22solution+comes+to+you+and+you+do+not+know%22&hl=en, but no source is provided, and the similarity to the "Life Magazine" quote above suggests it's likely a misquote.
Source: Attributed in posthumous publications, Einstein and the Poet (1983), p. 136
“My life used to be full of everything. Now if you aren't with me I haven't a thing in the world.”
Source: A Farewell to Arms