When each moment becomes an expectation life is deprived of fulfillment, and death is dreaded for it seems that here expectation must come to an end. - Alan Watts

The precious … uniqueness which the human individual claims is conferred on him not by possession of an immortal soul but by possession of a mortal body.… If death gives life individuality and if man is the organism which represses death, then man is the organism which represses his own individuality.” Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death

Our progress has been almost exclusively technological, which means that we are able to manipulate the physical world ever more sensationally, to increase the speed, the span, and the powers of material existence without any clear idea of what to do with the time gained and the powers acquired.

concerns itself with the linguistic, ethical, legal, and ritual conventions which provide the society with its system of communication. Confucianism, in other words, preoccupies itself with conventional knowledge, and under its auspices children are brought up so that their originally wayward and whimsical natures are made to fit the Procrustean bed of the social order. The individual defines himself and his place in society in terms of the Confucian formulae.