34 Jeremiah also bewails his birth in these words: “Woe is me, my mother! Why have you borne me a man of contention in all the earth? I have not benefited others, nor has any one benefited me, my strength has failed.” If, then, holy men shrink from life whose life, though profitable to us, is esteemed unprofitable to themselves; what ought we to do who am not able to profit others, and who feel that it, like money borrowed at interest, grows more heavily weighted every day with an increasing mass of sins?
35. “I die daily,” says the Apostle. Better certainly is this saying than theirs who said that meditation on death was true philosophy, for they praised the study, he exercised the practice of death. And they acted for themselves only, but Paul, himself perfect, died not for his own weakness but for ours. But what is meditation on death but a kind of separation of body and soul, for death itself is defined as nothing else than the separation of body and soul? But this is in accordance with common opinion.
Source: On the Death of Satyrus (New Advent)