It is easy to be courageous when you are insensible to the exterior world and its dangers.

Ambition in a corporeally contained consciousness is pointless to the point of obscenity. For when the blast opens your chest, or the chemicals corrode your liver, or the automobile smashes your spine, or the disease devours your brain, or the cricket bat flattens the back of your head, or the decay triumphs as it must, you discover that all mortal ambition definitively reduces to a bloody smear, and that all that stress you suffered in pursuit of something was for nothing, and you could have instead spent your finite days relaxing and reading philosophy.