If there’s another world, he lives in bliss;
If there is none, he made the best of this.

These lines come from Robert Burns’s poem “Tam o’ Shanter” (1790), a comic narrative in Scots that follows Tam, a hard-drinking farmer, as he rides home late at night after lingering in an alehouse. In a famous digressive passage, Burns pauses to reflect on the conviviality of the tavern and on the fate of a “drouthy neibor” (a thirsty neighbor) who has died. The couplet functions like an epitaph: it offers a tolerant, almost secular consolation that the dead man either enjoys an afterlife or, if not, at least extracted what happiness he could from earthly life.

The couplet balances religious uncertainty with humane pragmatism. Burns refuses to argue doctrine; instead he frames the question of an afterlife as ultimately irrelevant to the value of a life well-lived. If heaven exists, the deceased is rewarded; if it does not, the measure of success becomes the capacity to find joy, fellowship, and warmth in the present world. The tone is wry but compassionate, suggesting Burns’s broader sympathy for ordinary pleasures and his skepticism toward harsh moral judgment. As an “either way” consolation, it has endured as a succinct statement of tolerant, worldly wisdom.