It was either Voltaire or Charlie Sheen who said, ’We are born alone. We live alone. We die alone. And anything in between that can give us the illusion that we’re not, we cling to.’

Gabriel Byrne has used this line in a wry, self-deprecating way—jokingly attributing it to “Voltaire or Charlie Sheen”—to frame a bleakly comic observation about human solitude and the consolations people seek. The phrasing is widely associated with the character Jack Lucas (played by Byrne) in the film *The Fisher King* (1991), where it appears as a sardonic, emotionally guarded reflection amid themes of trauma, loneliness, and the search for connection. Byrne’s “Voltaire/Sheen” tag functions as a comic misdirection, signaling both the line’s aphoristic tone and its pop-cultural afterlife rather than a serious claim of authorship.

Byrne frames a bleak existential observation—human beings ultimately face birth, life, and death as solitary experiences—then undercuts it with a wry joke about attribution (“Voltaire or Charlie Sheen”). The humor highlights how aphorisms circulate untethered from reliable sources, while the sentiment itself points to a psychological truth: people seek relationships, art, belief, and community partly to soften the felt reality of isolation. The line suggests that what we “cling to” is not necessarily false, but functions as an “illusion” in the sense that it cannot fully erase the irreducible aloneness of individual consciousness and mortality.