Never, ever underestimate the importance of having fun.
Randy PauschRead
We don't beat the Reaper by living longer. We beat the Reaper by living well.
Interpretation
Living a fulfilling life is more important than simply living a long life.
Randy Pausch's quote emphasizes the importance of the quality of life over its duration. He suggests that one can truly 'defeat' the inevitable end of life not by extending its length, but by ensuring that one's time is spent in meaningful, fulfilling, and enjoyable ways. The focus here is on making the most of life through good choices, experiences, and living well.
In practice
During a motivational speech about making life choices.
Never, ever underestimate the importance of having fun.
I'm attempting to put myself in a bottle that will one day wash up on the beach for my children.
It's hard to raise awareness of pancreatic cancer - people who get it don't live long enough.
Brick walls are there for a reason. They give us a chance to show how badly we want
Cancer didn't change me at all. I know lots of people talk about the life revelation. I didn't have that.
I think that we all stand on the dartboard of life. Roughly 30,000 people a year are going to catch a dart labeled pancreatic cancer, and that's unfortunate. It's not what I would have chosen. But I in no way feel like I deserved it.
My grandfather was a Pullman porter, and my father put his way through college by cleaning floors at night in the libraries. I understand that working people are in some way the bedrock of my existence and the existence of many people here.
Our lives disconnect and reconnect, we move on, and later we may again touch one another, again bounce away. This is the felt shape of a human life, neither simply linear nor wholly disjunctive nor endlessly bifurcating, but rather this bouncey-castle sequence of bumpings-into and tumblings-apart.
From my point of view, your life is already a miracle of chance waiting for you to shape its destiny.
Rivers know this: there is no hurry. We shall get there some day.
Life is not orderly. No matter how we try to make it so, right in the middle of it we die, lose a leg, fall in love, or drop a jar of applesauce.
I'm very serious about no alcohol, no drugs. Life is too beautiful.
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