While knowing that we will die someday, we think that all the others will die before us and that we will be the last to go. Death seems a long way off. Is this not shallow thinking? It is worthless and is only a joke within a dream…. Insofar as death is always at one’s door, one should make sufficient effort and act quickly. —Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai, Yamamoto Tsunetomo (1659–1720)
