When Breath Becomes Air Quotes That Celebrate Life

A doctor saves a life. But what of the doctor who can’t be saved? Paul Kalanithi was on the verge of becoming a neurosurgeon after training for almost a decade, when he was diagnosed with lung cancer.

His fight with cancer is recorded in this book, which was published posthumously in 2016. Lacking a sense of gratefulness? Check out these When Breath Becomes Air quotes to appreciate life as we know it.

28 When Breath Becomes Air Quotes on Life and the Will to Live

When Breath Becomes Air Quotes That Are Inspiring

#1. “I can’t go on. I’ll go on.” ― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air (inspired by Samuel Beckett)

#2. “We shall rise insensibly, and reach the tops of the everlasting hills, where the winds are cool and the sight is glorious.” ― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

#3. “Be ready. Be seated. See what courage sounds like. See how brave it is to reveal yourself in this way. But above all, see what it is to still live, to profoundly influence the lives of others after you are gone, by your words.” ― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

When Breath Becomes Air Quotes on Life

#4. “What makes life meaningful enough to go on living?” ― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

#5. “‘Will having a newborn distract from the time we have together?’ she asked. ‘Don’t you think saying goodbye to your child will make your death more painful? Wouldn’t it be great if it did?’ I said. Lucy and I both felt that life wasn’t about avoiding suffering.” ― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

#6. “Science may provide the most useful way to organize empirical, reproducible data, but its power to do so is predicated on its inability to grasp the most central aspects of human life: hope, fear, love, hate, beauty, envy, honor, weakness, striving, suffering, virtue.” ― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

#7. “Even if I’m dying, until I actually die, I am still living.” ― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

#8. “Life wasn’t about avoiding suffering.” ― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

#9. “I will share your joy and sorrow. Till we’ve seen this journey through.” ― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

#10. “If the unexamined life was not worth living, was the unlived life worth examining?” ― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

#11. “I would have to learn to live in a different way, seeing death as an imposing itinerant visitor but knowing that even if I’m dying, until I actually die, I am still living.” ― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

#12. “What kind of life exists without language?” ― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

When Breath Becomes Air Quotes on Wisdom

#13. “The main message of Jesus, I believed, is that mercy trumps justice every time.” ― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

#14. “Years ago, it had occurred to me that Darwin and Nietzsche agreed on one thing: the defining characteristic of the organism is striving.” ― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

#15. “The physician’s duty is not to stave off death or return patients to their old lives, but to take into our arms a patient and family whose lives have disintegrated and work until they can stand back up and face, and make sense of, their own existence.” ― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

#16. “Literature not only illuminated another’s experience, it provided, I believed, the richest material for moral reflection. My brief forays into the formal ethics of analytic philosophy felt dry as a bone, missing the messiness and weight of real human life.” ― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

#17. “I don’t believe in the wisdom of children, nor in the wisdom of the old. There is a moment, a cusp, when the sum of gathered experience is worn down by the details of the living. We are never so wise as when we live in the moment.” ― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

#18. “Moral duty has weight, things that have weight have gravity.” ― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

When Breath Becomes Air Quotes on Philosophy

#19. “Those burdens are what make medicine holy and wholly impossible: in taking up another’s cross, one must sometimes get crushed by the weight.” ― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

#20. “When there is no place for the scalpel, words are the surgeon’s only tool.” ― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

#21. “Before operating on a patient’s brain, I realized, I must first understand his mind: his identity, his values, what makes his life worth living, and what devastation makes it reasonable to let that life end.” ― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

#22. “(B)rains give rise to our ability to form relationships and make life meaningful. Sometimes, they break.” ― Paul Kalanithinithi, When Breath Becomes Air

When Breath Becomes Air Quotes on Illness

#23. “Severe illness wasn’t life-altering, it was life-shattering. It felt less like an epiphany—a piercing burst of light, illuminating What Really Matters—and more like someone had just firebombed the path forward.” ― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

#24. “Diseases are molecules misbehaving; the basic requirement of life is metabolism, and death its cessation.” ― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

#25. “Any major illness transforms a patient’s—really, an entire family’s—life.” ― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

Other When Breath Becomes Air Quotes

#26. “You can’t ever reach perfection, but you can believe in an asymptote toward which you are ceaselessly striving.” ― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

#27. “Human knowledge is never contained in one person. It grows from the relationships we create between each other and the world, and still, it is never complete.” ― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

#28. “There is a moment, a cusp, when the sum of gathered experience is worn down by the details of living. We are never so wise as when we live in this moment.” ― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

Conclusion

When Breath Becomes Air documents the transition of a medical student and highlights the curveballs they face every step of the way. When Breath Becomes Air quotes inspire people to fight their battles and never give up. It’s not too late to explore life, or these quotes.

Image source: pinterest.com