You’ll live. Only the best get killed.

Taken at face value, the line is a brusque, darkly humorous reassurance: survival is not shameful, and death is not the only measure of worth. It flips the usual consolation (“you’ll be fine”) into a soldierly, fatalistic quip that treats danger as ordinary and implies that the truly exceptional sometimes pay the highest price. If genuinely de Gaulle’s, it would fit a martial ethos that prizes composure under fire and uses irony to steady nerves. However, without a verifiable occasion or text, any reading remains tentative and should be treated as an interpretation of the aphorism rather than a securely contextualized statement by de Gaulle.