Joseph Epstein Quotes

We have no choice, we must all die. How we live, however, is entirely of our choosing.

I was blessed with a birth and a death, and I guess I just want some say in between.

Death is not the opposite of life, but the opposite of choice.

There are two things that you have to do in life: You have to die, and you have to live until you die. The rest is up to you.

... we die, just as we were born, at the edge of a road not of our choosing.

All men and women are born, live, suffer and die; what distinguishes us one from another is our dreams, whether they be dreams about worldly or unworldly things, and what we do to make them come about... We do not choose to be born. We do not choose our parents. We do not choose our historical epoch, the country of our birth, or the immediate circumstances of our upbringing. We do not, most of us, choose to die; nor do we choose the time and conditions of our death. But within this realm of choicelessness, we do choose how we live.

The inexorable compulsion of all things is towards health or destruction, life or death, and we hasten our joys or our woes to the logical extreme. It is urgent, therefore, that we be joyous if we wish to live.

You have a choice. Live or die. Every breath is a choice. Every minute is a choice. To be or not to be.

To be or not to be. That's not really a question.

To be, or not to be, that is the question.

We do not choose the day of our birth nor may we choose the day of our death, yet choice is the sovereign faculty of the mind.

I come down on the side of free will but I have sympathy for those who believe in fate because there is something about life which we feel we have no control over.

I don't know if I was put on this Earth for a purpose or not. But I'm fairly confident that I'll be taken off of it for one.

Outside of that single fatality of death, everything, joy or happiness, is liberty.

It always comes down to just two choices. Get busy living, or get busy dying.

Every man must die, Jon Snow. But first he must live.

I have a rendezvous with life.

We are not permitted to choose the frame of our destiny. But what we put into it is ours.

You can't even kill yourself if it isn't your time to go. People have no control whatsoever over what happens to them, and they are beginning to realize this. The future lies in the time of living. Your doing something will get you into tomorrow, if you want to call it tomorrow. If you want to make those distinctions at all.

I was thinking about how fleeting and precious life is. Life is also arbitrary. For example, the choices that you make, the luck of being born into the right bed, to parents who support and help you and who love you. That doesn't always happen - and then, what happens when it doesn't?

If we don't know life, how can we know death?

Why should I ask the wise men: Whence is my beginning? I am busy with the thought: Where will be my end?

The line between life or death is determined by what we are willing to do.

There is a great suspicion of saying that anyone, especially a child, is 'the product of destiny,' or 'formed by fate,' or 'predestined for a certain life.' I am suspicious, too, of efforts to cage children or adults in preconceived ideas of who they are or should be.

Life is like a game of cards. The hand you are dealt is determinism; the way you play it is free will.