Bianca's Reviews > Meditations: With Selected Correspondence

** spoiler alert ** One who feels a passionate desire for posthumous fame fails to recognize that everyone who remembers him will die very swiftly in his turn and then again the one who takes over from him, until all memory is utterly extinguished as it passes from one person to another and each in succession is lit and then snuffed out

Perfection of character requires this, that you should live each day as though it were your last, and be neither agitated, nor lethargic, nor act a part.

Do not disturb yourself by picturing your life as a whole; do not assemble in your mind the many and varied troubles which have come to you in the past and will come again in the future, but ask yourself with regard to every present difficulty; 'What is there in this that is unbearable and beyond endurance?' You would be ashamed to confess it! And then remind yourself that it is not the future or what has passed that afflicts you, but always the present, and the power of this is much diminished if you take it in isolation and call your mind to task if it thinks that it cannot stand up to it when taken on its own

The green grape, the ripe cluster, the dried raisin; at every point a change, not into non-existence, but into what is yet to be.