"He who fears death is already dead. He who wishes for a moment that his life would be his own life, who wishes for a moment to be sure of what he is doing, must grasp the present; he must see everything in the present as finite, conscious of the inevitability of death; and he must create life out of himself in the darkness.

Death can take nothing from him who lives in the present, because nothing in this man needs to continue to exist, nothing in him comes from fear of death... And death only takes away what was once born. It takes away what has already grasped the day when man was born, what lives in fear of death because of the very fact of birth."

- Carlo Michelstaedter