Life & Mortality Quote by Robert Fulghum

Fulghum’s credo reads like a gentle manifesto against the tyranny of the measurable. It’s a ladder of escalating claims, each one built on a deliberate reversal: imagination over knowledge, myth over history, dreams over facts. The intent isn’t to dunk on reason; it’s to relocate authority. He’s arguing that what actually moves people - what gets them through the day, what binds a community, what keeps a private life from collapsing - isn’t information but meaning. Knowledge can catalogue the world; imagination supplies a reason to stay in it.

The subtext is quietly corrective, aimed at a culture that confuses data with wisdom and confuses cynicism with maturity. “Hope always triumphs over experience” is the line that gives away the target: the grown-up voice that says you’ve seen too much to believe anymore. Fulghum treats that posture as a dead end, a kind of emotional bookkeeping that never adds up to a life. Myth isn’t “false” here; it’s the story-shaped container that makes pain, love, and loss livable. History tells you what happened. Myth tells you why it matters.

Structurally, the repetition of “That…” works like a litany, borrowing the cadence of prayer without overt religiosity. It invites assent, not debate. The emotional pivot is “laughter is the only cure for grief,” a line that refuses melodrama and insists on survival as a communal act: grief isolates; laughter re-links. Ending with “love is stronger than death” isn’t originality, it’s strategy - the oldest human defiance, offered not as proof but as a practice. In Fulghum’s world, the point isn’t winning an argument with reality. It’s outlasting it.