Enjoy life. There's plenty of time to be dead.

The line urges a carpe diem attitude: life is brief and uniquely available for experience, while death is inevitable and (in a grimly comic way) “endless,” so it makes no sense to rush toward it through needless worry, self-denial, or postponement. Its punch comes from the blunt contrast between living time (scarce, precious) and dead time (abundant, unavoidable). Although often attributed to Andersen, the sentiment fits a broader tradition of epigrammatic, dark-humored counsel that circulates widely in modern quotation culture, frequently detached from verifiable textual origins.