"If any god told you that you would die tomorrow-or certainly on the day after tomorrow-you would not care much whether it was on the third day or tomorrow unless you were in the highest mean spirited. For how small is the difference? So think it no great think to die after as many years as you can name rather than tomorrow. Think continually how many physicians are dead after so much furrowing their brows at the sick, and how many astrologers after predicting with great pretensions the deaths of others, and how many philosophers after endless discorses on death or immorality, how many heroes after killing thousands, and how many tyrants who use their power over peoples lives with terrible insolence as if the were immortal, and how manh cities are entirely dead, so to speak....add to the reckoning all whom you have known, one after another. One man buries another and is then laid out dead himself, and another buries him. And all this in but a short time."
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
