Moral influence means persuading another that one can make that other more uncomfortable than that other can make oneself. - Samuel Butler

To himself every one is an immortal: he may know that he is going to die, but he can never know that he is dead.

We find it difficult to sympathise with the emotions of a potato; so we do with those of an oyster. Neither of these things makes a noise on being boiled or opened, and noise appeals to us more strongly than anything else, because we make so much about our own sufferings. Since, then, they do not annoy us by any expression of pain we call them emotionless; and so qua mankind they are; but mankind is not everybody.

There is nothing which at once affects a man so much and so little as his own death.