Abraham Verghese Quotes

The tragedy is not to die, but to be wasted.

Barefoot conducts his seminars on his houseboat in Sausalito. It costs a hundred dollars to find out why we are on this Earth. You also get a sandwich, but I wasn't hungry that day. John Lennon had just been killed and I think I know why we are on this Earth; it's to find out that what you love the most will be taken away from you, probably due to an error in high places rather than by design.

Death is not a tragedy to the one who dies; to have wasted the life before that death, that is the tragedy.

Life would be so wonderful if we only knew what to do with it.

But he who dies in despair has lived his whole life in vain.

Life is wasted on the living.

Death is always and under all circumstances a tragedy, for if it is not, then it means that life itself has become one.

I feel like I'm not on Earth just to shake it and shake it endlessly, you know?

I think the saddest thing in the world will be for people who face their death and realize they never lived. That won't be me.

One of the worst things that can happen to a man is for him to work and study hard in order to benefit others and make his own name and then be prevented by sickness, or perhaps death itself, from finally completing what he has begun

The greatest tragedy in life is not to die, it is to live as if dead, to let the life within us wither. Toward what goal or achievement are we striving in life? This is the important question to ask ourselves.

Life is short, and therefore, one thing being certain, death, let us take up a great ideal, and give up the whole life to it. For what is the value of life, this vegetating little low life of man? Subordinating it to one high ideal is the only value that life has.

Be happy that after living so many lives, I finally found something to die for

I don't regret it, you know. I would do it all again. Children are our hope for the future." THERE IS NO HOPE FOR THE FUTURE, said Death. "What does it contain, then?" ME.

Oh, the worst of all tragedies is not to die young, but to live until I am seventy five and yet not ever truly to have lived.

Don't die with your music still in you. Don't die with your purpose unfulfilled. Don't die feeling as if your life has been wrong. Don't let that happen to you.

The greatest tragedy is not death, but life without purpose.

It is finished, is never said of us

If I just got up in the morning and had no place to go and was retired or something, I would be sitting there and be thinking, "Gee, what is the purpose of life? Why are we all finite? Why do we get old and die? Is there nothing out there? Why is it so tragic? Why do our loved ones perish? Why do we generate?" Who wants to think about that stuff?

It is a tragedy that most of us die before we have begun to live.

Life has taught me that the greatest tragedy is not to die too soon but to live too long.

The aim of life is to be fully born, though its tragedy is that most of us die before we are thus born.

The greatest tragedy in life is not death, but a life without a purpose.

Man cannot stand a meaningless life.

The whole life of a philosopher is the meditation of his death.