Does the light of a lamp shine and keep its glow until its fuel is spent? Why shouldn’t your truth, justice, and self-control shine until you are extinguished?
—Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 12.15
Seneca, repeating Heraclitus, writes that “we mortals are lighted and extinguished.” The light of reason suffuses the universe. Whether the wick of your lamp is being lit for the first time, after a long period of darkness, or even right before the proverbial big sleep, it makes no difference.
Here is where you are right now, and it’s as good a place as any to let virtue shine and continue to shine for as long as you exist.
* Source: The Daily Stoic by Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman