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Do what thy manhood bids thee do, from none but self expect applause;
He noblest lives and noblest dies who makes and keeps his self-made laws.
All other Life is living Death, a world where none but Phantoms dwell,
A breath, a wind, a sound, a voice, a tinkling of the camel-bell.

 

Sir Richard Francis Burton

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Lives are spoiled and made rotten by the sense that death is distant and irrelevant. One lives better when one expects to die, say, at forty, when one says to oneself long before one is twenty: whatever I may be able to accomplish, I should be able to do by then; and what I have not done by then, I am not likely to do ever. One cannot count on living until one is forty or thirty but it makes for a better life if one has a rendezvous with death.
Not only can love be deepened and made more intense and impassioned by the expectation of impending death; all of life is enriched by it. Why deceive myself to the last moment, and hungrily devour sights, sounds, and smells only when it is almost too late? In our treatment of others, too, it is well to remember that they will die: it makes for greater humanity.

 

Walter (philosopher) Kaufmann

 

Choose the life that is noblest, for custom can make it sweet to thee.

 

Epictetus

 

From scenes like these, old Scotia's grandeur springs,
That makes her loved at home, revered abroad:
Princes and lords are but the breath of kings,
"An honest man's the noblest work of God."

 

Robert Burns

 

We go back home. We wait and then have dinner. We live these few hours. And we see ourselves alone in the house, facing each other, as never we saw ourselves, and we do not know what to do! It is a real drama of vacancy which is breaking loose. We are living together; our movements are in harmony, they touch and mingle. But all of it is empty. We do not long for each other, we can no longer expect each other, we have no dreams, we are not happy. It is a sort of imitation of life by phantoms, by beings who, in the distance are beings, but close by — so close — are phantoms!

 

Henri Barbusse

 

A people is not led according to its will; the democratic formula; nor according to the will of one individual: the dictatorial formula. But according to laws. I do not talk here of man-made laws. There are norms, natural laws of life; and there are norms, natural laws of death. Laws of life and laws of death. A nation is headed for life or death according to its respect for one or the other of these laws.

 

Corneliu Zelea Codreanu