Charlie Munger never pretended life was easy. He just refused to believe in surrender.

Two weeks before he died at 99 in 2023, the Berkshire Hathaway vice chairman sat down with CNBC for what would become his final interview. No flowery language, no corporate polish. Just Munger doing what he did best: telling you exactly how things are.

"We all know how to get through them," he said, talking about life's inevitable hardships. "The great philosophers of realism are also the great philosophers of what I call soldiering through. If you soldier through, you can get through almost anything. And it's your only option."

This wasn't motivational poster material. This was someone who'd actually lived through the worst and came out the other side.

"You can't bring back the dead, you can't cure the dying child. You can't do all kinds of things. You have to soldier through it," Munger explained. "If you have to walk through the streets, crying for a few hours a day as part of the soldiering, go ahead and cry away. But you have to – you can't quit. You can cry all right, but you can't quit."

When the interviewer asked if he'd experienced this firsthand, Munger didn't hesitate.

"Sure. I cried all the time when my first child died," he said. "But I knew I couldn't change the fate. In those days, the fatality with childhood leukemia was 100%."

A Loss That Changed Everything

His son Teddy died at nine years old in 1955. There was no treatment. No hope. Just a father watching his child slip away from a disease that medicine couldn't touch yet.

"Now the cure rate is way up in the 90s," Munger noted decades later. "And it's an amazing development. Think of how much pleasure it's given me to watch the cure rate for leukemia."

Even in discussing one of life's most unbearable losses, Munger kept his eyes on the broader arc of progress. "What mankind did, what mankind and civilization did was soldier through those tough years that took away my cousin, Tommy, from meningitis, and then took away my son Teddy from leukemia," he said. "Imagine a cure. Imagine pretty well fixing that disease for families who came into life later. It's a huge achievement."

Then came the line that captured why a 99-year-old man who'd seen more than his share of pain could still sound optimistic.

"You can see why I like civilization," Munger said. "To me, civilization is what man has done with the last two centuries. And it's been a good thing to watch."

The Philosophy Behind The Fortune

By the time of that final interview, Munger had endured vision loss, buried a child, gone through a divorce, and helped build one of history's most successful investment records. His reputation was built on sharp thinking and sharper words, but beneath the famous wit was something simpler: keep moving forward when there's nothing else to do.

You can cry. But you can't quit.

That was Munger's answer to life's hardest questions. Two years after his death, it still resonates.

Everyone faces those moments when things feel completely broken. A job disappears, medical bills pile up, relationships fall apart, dreams collapse. Munger understood this better than most. His philosophy wasn't about toxic positivity or pretending everything's fine. It was about acknowledging the pain and then figuring out what comes next.

The crying part? That's human. That's normal. That's allowed.

The quitting part? That's not on the table.

Munger spent nearly a century watching civilization soldier through its own struggles and emerge stronger. He watched medicine conquer diseases that once had 100% fatality rates. He watched markets crash and recover. He watched humanity face down problems that seemed insurmountable and find solutions anyway.

His message wasn't complicated: when life knocks you down, you don't have to pretend it doesn't hurt. You just have to get back up. Because ultimately, that's the only option that leads anywhere.