Some people waste their lives as voluntary slaves, serving powerful men who never repay their loyalty. Many spend their time either trying to steal other people's wealth or complaining about their own lack of money. A great number have no clear goals at all. They drift from one half-baked scheme to another, restless and fickle and never satisfied. Some people care so little about anything that they don't even try to succeed. They just lie around yawning lazily until death finds them. This makes me certain that the greatest poet was right when he wrote that famous line—
some wear away their lives in that voluntary slavery, the unrequited service of great men: many are occupied either in laying claim to other men's fortune or in complaining of their own: a great number have no settled purpose, and are tossed from one new scheme to another by a rambling, inconsistent, dissatisfied, fickle habit of mind: some care for no object sufficiently to try to attain it, but lie lazily yawning until their fate comes upon them: so that I cannot doubt the truth of that verse which the greatest of poets has dressed in the guise of an oracular response—