Daily Inspiration Quote by William Goldman

Goldman’s line lands like a shrug with teeth: it’s not an inspirational poster about gratitude, it’s a screenwriter-novelist’s blunt admission that the world runs on trade-offs, not fairness. “But” is doing heavy lifting here. It signals a rebuttal to someone’s fantasy of neat outcomes - love that doesn’t cost anything, justice that arrives on schedule, success without compromise. Goldman’s real subject is expectation management, delivered with the kind of weary realism that shows up in his best-known work: stories that promise romance or heroism and then quietly remind you the bill always comes due.

The phrase “life on earth” widens the frame. He’s not arguing with a person so much as with the cosmic customer-service desk. The subtext is: stop negotiating with reality. Not because you’re wrong to want more, but because wanting doesn’t change the operating system. That’s why the line stings; it denies the modern entitlement that every desire is also a right.

“You can’t have everything” sounds like a cliche until Goldman makes it feel personal. The refusal is absolute, but the tone isn’t cruel. It’s pragmatic, even tender in its way: accept limits, choose what matters, and live with the residue of what you didn’t pick. In a culture trained to optimize, his sentence is a small act of resistance - an insistence that adulthood is learning to lose something on purpose.