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Daily Inspiration Quote by Giovanni Morassutti

"We know how we were born, but know not how we will die"

About this Quote

It lands like a shrug at the edge of a cliff: birth is a fact on paper, death is a blank the body refuses to fill in. Morassutti, coming from an actor’s craft where control is rehearsed and outcomes are blocked, leans into the one plot point nobody can script. The line’s power is its asymmetry. “We know” opens with the confidence of paperwork, family stories, medical records. Then “but know not” quietly pulls that certainty out from under us, swapping biography for mystery in six words.

The intent feels less philosophical than practical: a reminder that the only guaranteed information we get about our life arc is its opening scene. Everything after that, including the ending, is rumor. Subtextually, it’s an antidote to modern self-mythmaking. We live in an era of quantified selves and curated narratives, where people talk about “legacy” like it’s a brand deck. Morassutti punctures that fantasy. You can document your origin, you can even perform your identity, but you can’t storyboard your exit.

Context matters here because actors trade in endings nightly. They die onstage, get resurrected for curtain call, repeat. Real death doesn’t offer that release valve. The quote works because it compresses that backstage knowledge into a single, plainspoken sentence: certainty is always retrospective. The future remains uncast, and the one scene everyone shares is the one nobody gets to preview.

Quote Details

TopicMortality
SourceHelp us find the source
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Citation Formats

APA Style (7th ed.)
Morassutti, Giovanni. (2026, January 14). We know how we were born, but know not how we will die. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/we-know-how-we-were-born-but-know-not-how-we-will-171439/

Chicago Style
Morassutti, Giovanni. "We know how we were born, but know not how we will die." FixQuotes. January 14, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/we-know-how-we-were-born-but-know-not-how-we-will-171439/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"We know how we were born, but know not how we will die." FixQuotes, 14 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/we-know-how-we-were-born-but-know-not-how-we-will-171439/. Accessed 6 Feb. 2026.

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About the Author

Giovanni Morassutti

Giovanni Morassutti (born March 15, 1980) is a Actor from Italy.

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