Daily Inspiration Quote by Candice Bergen

Dreams don’t just die; they’re born with an expiration date. Candice Bergen’s line lands because it refuses the usual inspirational varnish and instead treats aspiration like something perishable, almost doomed from inception. Coming from an actress whose career has moved through glamour, reinvention, and the machinery of public attention, it reads less like pessimism than like hard-earned literacy about desire: the moment a dream becomes specific enough to chase, it also becomes specific enough to outgrow.

The intent is bracingly anti-myth. Bergen isn’t attacking ambition; she’s puncturing the fantasy that a dream can stay pristine while life happens. “By definition” is the tell: she frames the short lifespan as structural, not personal failure. That small rhetorical move shifts blame away from the dreamer and toward the nature of dreaming itself. A dream is a projection, a temporary story your brain tells to bridge the gap between now and next. Once you reach “next,” the story either collapses into reality or mutates into a new want.

The subtext is about identity management, especially in celebrity culture where the “dream” is often packaged as a brand. In that world, holding onto one dream too long can look like stagnation; letting it die can look like betrayal. Bergen’s sentence offers a third option: treat dream-death as normal metabolism. The curse isn’t that dreams end; it’s that we’re taught to mourn the ending as if it proves we didn’t believe enough, when it may just prove we kept living.