The quote "I [prefer] a short life with width to a narrow one with length." is famous quote attributed to Avicenna (980–1037), medieval Persian polymath, physician, and philosopher.
As quoted in Avicenna (Ibn Sina): Muslim Physician And Philosopher of the Eleventh Century http://books.google.com.bh/books?id=B8k3fsvGRyEC&lpg=PA85&dq=I%20prefer%20a%20short%20life%20with%20width%20to%20a%20narrow%20one%20with%20length&pg=PA85#v=onepage&q=I%20prefer%20a%20short%20life%20with%20width%20to%20a%20narrow%20one%20with%20length&f=false (2006), by Aisha Khan p. 85, which cites Genius of Arab Civilizations by M.A. Martin.
As quoted in Meditations for Women Who Do Too (1991) by Anne Wilson Schaef
Source: The Story of My Life: With Her Letters (1887 1901) and a Supplementary Account of Her Education Including Passages from the Reports and Letters of Her Teacher Anne Mansfield Sullivan by John Albert Macy
… What excellent advice it is, and how it was beaten into my generation of schoolboys... But one may tire of even the best advice, as one may tire of writing according to these precepts. Would we wish to be without the heraldic splendour and torchlight processions that are the sentences of Sir Thomas Browne? Would we wish to sacrifice the orotund, Latinate pronouncements of Samuel Johnson? Would we wish that Dickens had written in the style recommended by the brothers Fowler, who framed the rules I have quoted; what would then have happened to Seth Pecksniff, Wilkins Micawber, and Sairey Gamp, I ask you?
Writing (1990), he here quotes from The King's English (1906) by Henry Watson Fowler & Francis George Fowler
Source: Clockwork Prince
Source: Meditations (c. AD 121–180), Book III, 10
“It is not the length of life, but the depth.”
Source: Paul and Virginia by Bernardin de St. Pierre, Fiction, Literary
“Life-and-death. Lifedeath. One event. One short event. Don’t forget.”
All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten (1986)
