where there's life, there's hope

As long as someone or something has not completely failed or ended, a bad situation still has a chance of getting better. I know we've sustained heavy losses over the past two quarters, but we still have enough cash reserves to get things on the right track. Where there's life, there's hope. Everyone assumed we had lost the game at that point, but where there's life, there's hope, and just like that, a final push by our offense lead to a last-minute touchdown that gave us the win.

So long as there’s a chance of success, there’s hope that it will happen. This ancient saying goes back to the time of the Greeks and Romans, and presumably at first referred to very ill individuals who, it was hoped, might still recover. It soon was extended to other situations. The Roman writer Seneca reported that Telesphorus of Rhodes, who was put into a cage by the tyrant Lysimachus about 310 b.c., made this statement, adding “only the dead are hopeless.” Cicero used it in Ad Atticum (ca. 49 b.c.), “As a sick man is said to have hope as long as he has life, so did I not cease to hope so long as Pompey was in Italy.” The saying entered numerous proverb collections and remains current, although sometimes it is used in a lighter context: for example, “The soufflé fell but it’s still edible; while there’s life there’s hope.”