The things highly valued in life are empty and rotten and trivial; we are little dogs biting each other, quarrelsome children laughing and then crying…. Reputation, in such a world, is meaningless. What then? You graciously wait for death – for extinction, or for passage to another state. And until the time for that has arrived, what is enough? What else but to venerate and praise the gods, to do good to others, and to treat them with tolerance and restraint; and as for what is within the bounds of your body and your breath, to remember that it is neither yours nor up to you. Marcus Aurelius,
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