This book belongs to the most rare of men. Perhaps not one of them is yet alive. First the day after tomorrow must come for me. Some men are born posthumously.

Uncommon Experiences Create Uncommon Men.

I have an idea that some men are born out of their due place. Accident has cast them amid certain surroundings, but they have always a nostalgia for a home they know not. They are strangers in their birthplace, and the leafy lanes they have known from childhood or the populous streets in which they have played, remain but a place of passage. They may spend their whole lives aliens among their kindred and remain aloof among the only scenes they have ever known. Perhaps it is this sense of strangeness that sends men far and wide in the search for something permanent, to which they may attach themselves. Perhaps some deep-rooted atavism urges the wanderer back to lands which his ancestors left in the dim beginnings of history.

There is quite another class of exceptions: those so gifted by nature that they rise above the level of their age. As there are men who never get beyond infancy, so there are others who are never, so to speak, children, they are men almost from birth.

The luckiest men die worthwhile deaths

There are some men in this world who are born to do our unpleasant jobs for us. Your father's one of them.

Why is it that great men so often have mediocrities for their offspring? Is it because the gamble of the genes that produced them — the commingling of ancestral traits and biological possibilities — was but a chance, and could not be expected to recur? Or is it because the genius exhausts in thought and toil the force that might have gone to parentage, and leaves only his diluted blood to his heirs? Or is it that children decay under ease, and early good fortune deprives them of the stimulus to ambition and growth?

Every man has two deaths, when he is buried in the ground and the last time someone says his name. In some ways men can be immortal.

That was a time when a man had the right to be burried by his own son an' a son had the right to burry his own father.

All men are born free: just not for long.

I'm saying that some men are saints. Some are happy being meek and humble and unambitious. Some men are born content to be second-best.

Men passionately desire to live after death, but they often pass away without noticing the fact that the memory of a really good person always lives. It is impressed upon the next generation, and is transmitted again to the children. Is that not an immortality worth striving for?

Nothing is slower than the true birth of a man.

Men are born to strive and suffer. Our woes only vanish when we die. I