The Roman emperor who rehearsed his own death every morning

Marcus Aurelius wrote himself a private reminder: he could leave life right now, so let that fact decide what he did, said, and thought. As emperor, he treated constant awareness of death not as morbid but as clarifying, using it to strip away trivial ambitions and refocus on what actually mattered. The practice, now called memento mori, turns mortality into a tool for living on purpose rather than a fact to avoid.

— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations — Book 2, Section 11
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