Maxim

Remember that you will die, and live well today.

Our days are numbered, and remembering it is not morbid but clarifying. Keeping death in view shrinks petty quarrels and turns us back towards what is good while we still can.

Related expressions

• “Do not act as if thou wert going to live ten thousand years. Death hangs over thee. While thou livest, while it is in thy power, be good.”

  — Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book IV.17, tr. George Long
  Watch on YouTube: Steve Jobs' 2005 Stanford address ↗Steve Jobs discusses this idea
  StoicismClassical (200 BCE – 600 CE)relation: expressesVerifiedsourceTranslation: public-domain translation (George Long)

• “The world does not know that we must all come to an end here;--but those who know it, their quarrels cease at once.”

  — The Buddha, Dhammapada 6, tr. F. Max Müller
  BuddhismAncient (before 200 BCE)relation: similarVerifiedsourceTranslation: public-domain translation (Müller)

• “Where death waits for us is uncertain; let us look for him everywhere. The premeditation of death is the premeditation of liberty; he who has learned to die has unlearned to serve.”

  — Michel de Montaigne, Essays, Book I, ch. 19, “That to study philosophy is to learn to die”, tr. Charles Cotton, ed. W. C. Hazlitt
  Renaissance humanismEarly modern (1500 – 1800)relation: expressesVerifiedsourceTranslation: public-domain translation (Charles Cotton)

Score

Moral Rank 78.3 · Evidence E = 17.53

E = ln(1+3.26) + √3.26 + 3·3.26 + 1.5·3 = 17.53

How this is scored

Further reading

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memento_mori
• Marcus Aurelius, Meditations (free text, Project Gutenberg)