Cicero says that philosophizing is nothing other than preparing oneself for death. This is because study and contemplation, on the one hand, withdraw our soul from the affairs of the body and divert it; and on the other hand, they accustom us to it: for in truth, neither knowledge nor virtue, nor any excellent thing, can be exercised in this universe without it. But I conclude with reason that it must serve this end: let us consider ordinary men. They go toward death without knowing that they are going to it; they enter it without knowing it; and if it does not overtake them entirely by surprise, it is rare that they have not at least been forewarned of the danger and already faced it. We do not know how to die. As soon as a man loses his health, he is astonished, he weeps, he groans, he wants to be pitied, as though he were about to learn what illness is. And if, in the end, death arrives, he is quite distraught and beside himself. Let us prepare ourselves, then, from this very moment, for the business that occupies us every day. The precept of this preparation is simple: from wherever death comes, let us await it. According to an ancient saying, whoever flees death will find it behind him; whoever thinks nothing of it meets it always before him. Since we are threatened by death at every instant, let us await it at every hour. To await it at every hour: it is an absolute certainty that we can never be sure of a single hour, nor of the next. The whole office of our life comes down to this: the ends of other species are fixed and given, like those of their species; and ours is that men die when they have lived; but in such a way that we always live in hope of a future. We possess nothing but the present, and that alone belongs to us. Concern for the future not only disturbs us, but robs us even of our care for the present; and it abandons us to what is not ours, to what is not yet ours. Our life is a garment so short, and that falls so soon from upon us, that the care of trimming its train is altogether superfluous. Let us therefore resolve to make each day, each one of our days, finally perfect; and to set in order the last point of our existence. If I knew that tomorrow should be the end of my life, and that I had to sketch today the plan of my work, I would want to draw it so that it might be perfect, and carry away the satisfaction of it. Let us begin, before all things, by training our mind in a right and firm attitude, able to judge human affairs without passion. Death can surprise the laborer as well as the king; it distinguishes neither age nor rank; it waits for us at every door, and knocks equally at that of the poor man and that of the great man. Let everyone, in every season and in every place, be ready to depart, and know that there is nothing in the world upon which he depends less than the moment and the manner. Let us judge, as things not in our power, sufferings and death themselves; let us learn rather to endure what we cannot avoid, than to wage a vain war against nature. Nature has offered us her hand to go forward to meet her: she shows us the way, and renders it, moreover, gentle and easy. If we take death with fear, it is because we do not know its nature; if we knew it, we would see that it is but a moment, a passage, an ending that completes the picture. Whoever has learned to die has unlearned how to serve. There is no evil, for one who has once passed the bounds of life and surrendered his remains to nature; she always knows, better than we do, when they must be returned. Death is the end of all evils, or, if there are others, it delivers us from them; and when it announces them, it forestalls them more than it prepares them. I want death to find me planting my cabbages, but indifferent to it, and even more so to my unfinished garden. I have seen good men die who, all their lives, had thought of nothing less than mourning it in advance; and others, on the contrary, who, from their youth, had bent themselves to it, and, having it always present in their minds, received it at last like an old and familiar acquaintance. If we fear to face it beforehand, we shall never face it without weakness; but if we have long looked upon it, it loses its terrible face, and appears to us only as the ordinary companion of our life, who ceaselessly serves us as a lesson. Let us live among men, then, as though our spirit already knew our end draws near: not with sadness, but with wisdom; for he who each day recaps his life cannot be surprised, and he who each day has ordered his affairs as though he had finished his work will never have to repent of having lived.