Everything that goes up must come down. But there comes a time when not everything that’s down can come up.

George Burns (1896–1996), the long-lived American vaudevillian, comedian, and actor, was known for one-liners that mixed show-business savvy with wry reflections on aging. This quip plays on a familiar proverb about inevitability (“what goes up must come down”), then pivots to a darker, comic truth about decline: with age, careers, bodies, and fortunes don’t always rebound. Burns’s public persona in his later decades—cigar in hand, joking about mortality and longevity—made this kind of aphorism a staple of his interviews and stage patter, where humor softened an unsentimental view of time’s limits.

The line begins with a commonplace about reversals and gravity, suggesting a world governed by predictable cycles. The second sentence undercuts that comfort: while rises are reliably followed by falls, falls are not reliably followed by rises. Burns turns the symmetry of the proverb into an asymmetry about human life—especially aging and opportunity. The joke lands because it is both logically neat and emotionally true: optimism often assumes recovery is always possible, but experience teaches that some losses are permanent. The humor is not purely cynical; it’s a pragmatic invitation to value momentum and time while they’re available.