"“[...]are you not ashamed, you little clay doll, soon to be dust"

“[...]are you not ashamed, you little clay doll, soon to be dust, blown up like a bubble with your own momentary puff, full of pride, all swollen with inflamed delusion and inflating your mind with empty conceit? Do you not see at each end the limits of human life, how it begins and where it ends? Yet you glory in your youth, you look to the blossom of your fresh years, and you boast of your full bloom, because your hands are strong for lifting, your feet agile for jumping, your curls blow about in the wind [...] Yes, perhaps you look even to your shoes, carefully polished with blacking and smart with extravagantly stitched lines, yet do you not look at yourself? I will shew you your reflection, who you are and what you are. Have you not seen in the burial ground the mysteries of our existence? Have you not seen the heap of bones piled on each other, skulls stripped of flesh, staring fearsome and horrible from empty eye-sockets? Have you seen the grinning mouths and the rest of the limbs lying casually about? If you have seen those things, then in them you have seen yourself. [...] What faint shadow so escapes our grasp as the dream of youth, no sooner appearing than instantly flown? So much for those who are foolish in their youth because they have not yet grown up. What might be said about those now of established maturity, whose youth has gone, but their character is unstable, and the disease of pride increases? The name they give to this infirmity of character is 'dignity'. As often as not imperial office and the exercise of its power become the excuse for pride. [...] Those however who strut on the stage of life because of imperial office [...] They stay no longer within the bounds of human nature, but assume divine power and authority. They believe they have sovereignty over life and death because to some of those who are judged by them they give sentence of acquital, while others they condemn to death; and they do not even consider who is truly the sovereign of human life and determines both the beginning of existence and its end. Nevertheless this alone should have been enough to restrain vain conceit, the sight of many rulers even during the performance of their reign snatched from their very thrones and carried out to their graves, and for them lamentation has replaced the cries of the heralds. How then can he be sovereign over life which does not belong to him, when his own does not belong to him? Even that person, therefore, if he becomes poor in spirit, looking to the one who willingly became poor because of us, and observing the equal respect we owe to members of our race, will not inflict injury on those who share his origin as a result of that mistaken masquerade of government[...]” (Gregory of Nyssa, Sermon on the Beatitudes, §6-7)