Golden Verses 6 — Remember Mortality and the Turning of Fortune (lines 15–16)

But know this: that to die is fated for all. And that wealth, by its nature, is at one time gained and at another lost.

The poem now turns from how to act to how to see — and the first thing it commands us to see clearly is mortality. Thanéein péprōtai hápasin — "to die is fated for all." This is placed not morbidly but as a foundation for steadiness. Knowing that death is universal and certain reorders one's relationship to everything else; it deflates the anxieties that depend on pretending we have unlimited time. The Pythagorean injunction to know (gnôthi) one's mortality is an instruction to keep it consciously present, not buried.

Paired with mortality is the impermanence of wealth, and the verb is wonderfully apt: wealth phileî — "loves," "is fond of," "tends to" — being gained at one time and lost at another. Fortune is depicted almost as a creature with a temperament, naturally inclined to come and go. To expect it to stay is to misunderstand its nature. The wise person therefore holds wealth loosely, neither grasping when it comes nor devastated when it goes, because they understood from the start that holding-and-losing is simply what wealth does.

These two lines together are the Pythagorean foundation for equanimity, which the next verses will build upon directly. You cannot be steady in adversity if you secretly believe you are exempt from death and entitled to permanent prosperity. Strip away those two illusions, and the ground for resilience is laid.

The contemplation of mortality as a source of wisdom is one of the most universal of all spiritual practices. The Buddhist maraṇasati — mindfulness of death — is a formal meditation precisely on "death is certain for all," cultivated to loosen attachment and sharpen the value of the present. The Stoics named the same practice memento mori and the later European tradition made it a discipline of art and devotion. The Golden Verses' "to die is fated for all" is the seed of all of these.

The impermanence of fortune is the Buddhist anicca applied to possessions — the recognition that all conditioned things arise and pass — and it is the heart of the Stoic distinction between what is "up to us" (our judgments and choices) and what is not (wealth, reputation, the body's fate). The Bhagavad Gītā's counsel to act without attachment to the fruits of action rests on the same perception: outcomes come and go by their own law, and the wise hold them loosely.

The biblical wisdom literature voices it too — "the LORD gave, and the LORD has taken away" (Job), and Ecclesiastes' refrain on the vanity of clutching at gain. Across all these traditions the move is identical: contemplate the impermanence of life and goods not to despair but to be freed from the illusions that make us brittle.

The universal principle is that clear sight about death and impermanence is the foundation of equanimity. Almost all of our disproportionate fear and grasping comes from an unexamined assumption of permanence — that we and our circumstances will simply continue. Naming the two great impermanences, our mortality and the turning of fortune, does not make life bleak; it makes it light, because it dissolves the false stakes we attach to keeping what was never keepable.

To know that you will die is to be freed to live; to know that wealth comes and goes is to be freed from both the anxiety of having and the terror of losing.

Modern life is engineered to hide these two truths. Death is professionalized and kept out of sight; financial security is sold as something achievable and permanent if you only manage it correctly. The Pythagorean counsel cuts against both illusions — not to induce fear, but to restore proportion.

Practically: let the certainty of death inform your priorities. The question "if my time were genuinely limited — and it is — what would deserve my attention today?" is one of the most clarifying tools available, and it costs nothing. And hold material things with an open hand. By all means build, save, and provide — but internalize that fortune "loves to be gained and lost," so that a market downturn, a lost job, or a broken possession finds you steadied rather than shattered. The goal is not to care about nothing, but to stop staking your peace on things whose nature is to change.