Ambition Means Tying Your Well-being To What

Do Not Act As If You Were Going To Live Ten Thousand Years. Death Hangs Over You. While You Live, While It Is In Your Power, Be Good.

No Longer Let Thy Breathing Only Act In Concert With The Air Which Surrounds Thee, But Let Thy Intelligence Also Now Be In Harmony With The Intelligence Which Embraces All Things. For The Intelligent Power Is No Less Diffused In All Parts And Pervades All Things For Him Who Is Willing To Draw It To Him Than The Aërial Power For Him Who Is Able To Respire It.

...small Too Even The Longest Fame Thereafter, Which Is Itself Subject To A Succession Of Little Men Who Quickly Die, And Have No Knowledge Of Themselves, Let Alone Of Those Long Dead.

Look At Everything That Exists, And Observe That It Is Already In Dissolution And In Change, And As It Were Putrefaction Or Dispersion, Or That Everything Is So Constituted By Nature As To Die.

Everything Is Banal In Experience, Fleeting In Duration, Sordid In Content; In All Respects The Same Today As Generations Now Dead And Buried Have Found It To Be.