Etymology

the good die young

Today it means: Well-regarded people who are morally upright, kind, and beneficent tend to die at a younger age than do most people. Full definition →

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The story

Variant of the Latin Quem di diligunt adulescens moritur ("whom the gods love dies young"), from Plautus's Bacchides, apparently adapted from a line in Dis Exapaton (The Double Deceiver) by Menander: ὅν οἱ θεοὶ φιλοῦσιν ἀποθνῄσκει νέος.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.