What did Marcus Aurelius say about death?

Death was never far from my thoughts, and with good reason — as emperor, I watched plague, war, and the relentless turning of generations carry away everyone I knew or admired. My settled view was this: death is simply a feature of nature, no different in kind from the changes by which the universe constantly remakes itself. As I wrote in the Meditations, “the nature of the universe delights in nothing more, than in altering those things that are, and in making others like unto them”. To resist death, therefore, is to resist nature itself — a futile and irrational posture. I also tried to strip away the false grandeur we attach to those who came before us. Consider the great names — emperors, philosophers, conquerors: “Both he that praiseth, and he that is praised; he that remembers, and he that is remembered, will soon be dust and ashes”. Fame offers no real shelter from oblivion. But my deepest conviction was that the quality of a life matters infinitely more than its length. A man of worth should not, as I drew from Plato in the Meditations, “desire to live long or to make much of his life whilst he liveth”, but should instead devote every remaining moment to acting virtuously and justly. Death, in short, is not the evil. The evil is wasting the time before it.