What makes for freedom and fluency in the practice of writing? Knowledge of how to write. The same goes for the practice of playing an instrument. It follows that, in the conduct of life, there must be a science to living well.

No man can escape his destiny, the next inquiry being how he may best live the time that he has to live.

Death and life, honor and dishonor, pain and pleasure — all these things equally happen to good men and bad, being things which make us neither better nor worse. Therefore they are neither good nor evil.

I cannot escape death, but at least I can escape the fear of it.

Alexander the Macedonian and his groom were brought to the same state by death; for either they were received among the same seminal principles of the universe, or they were alike dispersed among the atoms.

You will give yourself relief, if you do every act of your life as if it were the last.

Death is not an evil. What is it then? The one law mankind has that is free of all discrimination.

About death: Whether it is a dispersion, or a resolution into atoms, or annihilation, it is either extinction or change.

If you shall be afraid not because you must some time cease to live, but if you shall fear never to have begun to live according to nature—then you will be a man worthy of the universe that has produced you, and you will cease to be a stranger in your native land.

Altogether the interval is small between birth and death; and consider with how much trouble, and in company with what sort of people and in what a feeble body, this interval is laboriously passed.

Death is necessary and cannot be avoided. I mean, where am I going to go to get away from it?

This, then, is consistent with the character of a reflecting man, to be neither careless nor impatient nor contemptuous with respect to death, but to wait for it as one of the operations of nature.

Brief is man’s life and small the nook of the earth where he lives; brief, too, is the longest posthumous fame, buoyed only by a succession of poor human beings who will very soon die and who know little of themselves, much less of someone who died long ago.

We mortals also are lighted and extinguished; the period of suffering comes in between, but on either side there is a deep peace