I was born when you kissed me. I died when you left me. I lived

Hear the words of Humphrey Bogart, spoken not as the actor of silver screens, but as a man who knew the weight of love and its fleeting flame: “I was born when you kissed me. I died when you left me. I lived a few weeks while you loved me.” These words are not lines of mere romance, but the cry of the human heart that knows how love can give life, and how its loss can strip that life away. They are a reminder that within the short span of passion lies both creation and destruction, both the rising of the soul and its breaking.

To say “I was born when you kissed me” is to recognize that love is not only an emotion, but a rebirth. For there are moments when a single touch, a single embrace, awakens something within us that had lain dormant. The ancients spoke of Eros, the god who strikes suddenly, and in that strike, life begins anew. A man or woman may live for many years, but until the fire of love ignites, they may not yet have truly lived. The kiss, then, is not only flesh meeting flesh, but spirit meeting spirit—the birth of a soul awakened to beauty and longing.

Yet Bogart continues, “I died when you left me.” Here he reveals the other face of love, the shadow that follows its light. For what is given in passion can be taken in departure. When the beloved withdraws, the one who remains feels the hollow silence, as though breath itself has been stolen. Such a death is not of the body, but of the heart—it is the withering of hope, the breaking of rhythm, the collapse of the world once held together by another’s presence. It is no small thing; it is the death that poets and prophets have sung of since the beginning of time.

And then the final confession: “I lived a few weeks while you loved me.” This is perhaps the deepest wound and the highest truth. For in that short span of time, Bogart declares, life reached its fullest measure. Better a few weeks of blazing passion than decades of emptiness. Better a short life lived in the fire of love than a long life in cold shadows. Here lies the paradox of love—it can be both the greatest blessing and the sharpest sorrow, yet even when it ends, we count the time it touched us as life itself.

History bears witness to such truths. Recall the tale of Antony and Cleopatra. Their love was not long, and it ended in tragedy, yet while it burned, it shaped empires and shook the foundations of Rome. To them, as to Bogart, life was measured not in years, but in moments of passion, in the fleeting time when love raised them above mortality. Their story reminds us that love, even when brief, justifies its pain, for it awakens the soul to a depth that nothing else can reach.

The lesson is this: do not fear the brevity of love, nor despise its end. If you have been reborn by a kiss, if you have died from a loss, if you have lived for even a short season in love’s embrace, then you have tasted life in its most profound form. Love does not promise eternity, but it promises truth, and that truth, however brief, is worth the cost.

In practice, this means: cherish the moments of love without clinging to illusions of permanence. When love comes, let it awaken you fully, and when it departs, grieve honestly, but do not despair, for even that grief is proof that you have truly lived. Let your life be measured not in its length, but in its depth. Seek not merely to exist, but to be born, to live, and yes, even to die in love, for in these three states, the fullness of the human spirit is revealed.

So let Bogart’s words echo as a testament: life is not in the years, but in the love that ignites them. If you are kissed and awakened, count it as birth. If you are abandoned and broken, count it as death. But if, for even a short while, you are loved, count it as life itself—the kind of life that poets carve into eternity.