One of my favourite quotes of Napoleon is the following:

"Death is nothing. But to live defeated and without glory, is to die every day."

I think he was probably influenced to say such a thing by reading the Shakespeare play, Julius Caesar, where the title character says:

Cowards die many times before their deaths,
The valiant never taste of death but once.
--Caesar [Julius Caesar 2.2.32-33]

A similar sentiment is expressed in this quote reported on the internet to belong to Marcus Aurelius:

"It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live."

However I am 90% certain that Aurelius never said this and that the above quote is a bastardised version of his opening paragraph of Book XII of the Meditations, which reads quite differently:

"If then, whatever the time may be when thou shalt be near to thy departure, neglecting everything else thou shalt respect only thy ruling faculty and the divinity within thee, and if thou shalt be afraid not because thou must some time cease to live, but if thou shalt fear never to have begun to live according to nature - then thou wilt be a man worthy of the universe which has produced thee, and thou wilt cease to be a stranger in thy native land, and to wonder at things which happen daily as if they were something unexpected, and to be dependent on this or that."

Whether he said the first quote or not, I like it and prefer it to what he actually said. But are any of these quotes right? Let's just make a brief analysis of them. They seem to be saying that bravery, valiance, risk-seeking, glory-seeking behaviour is a necessary virtue for a good life. The quotes are metaphorical, saying that to live without such a virtue is not to live at all; which we should understand as not living well. They remind me a little of Bertrand Russell's quote:

"Many people would sooner die than think; In fact, they do so."

I'd like to think all the quotes are metaphorical, otherwise they are relatively de-humanising. It's quite a common sentiment in the world that such-and-such a person, lacking such-and-such virtue or property, isn't really living at all. Sometimes these statements are deliberately hyperbolic, for example if I were to say, "You haven't lived until you've tasted this chocolate cake!" I should interpret them as saying:

"Without glory, life is unfulfilling."

The majority of people lead inglorious lives, but seem reasonably satisfied with them, finding value in other virtues. Or perhaps they equate less significant victories in their lives with glorious victories. Where Napoleon fixates on events like Marengo and Austerlitz, maybe for your typical peasant such events as a marriage, child or even a successful party or work bonus counts as a glorious victory. Does Napoleon reserve the glory for himself and his subordinate generals, or for every soldier in his army, and by extension the citizens of France who share in their glory? I don't think he believes in any such thing as shared glory. While Napoleon may revel in his role at Marengo (which he probably and rightfully believes to be the most important role), other soldiers can revel in their own roles at Marengo. Certainly he would say that the private who fights heroically without credit has more glory than the general who commands badly but contingently ends up on the winning side, and is acknowledged as such in dispatches.

Glory cannot be bought or sold and only in a perfect world is it conjoined with credit. Some people would say that there's little to distinguish bravery from stupidity. As they say in the movies when the hero makes a rash and dangerous decision, "He's either very, very brave, or very, very stupid." And glory or death, the foci of our enquiry, are the most likely results of bravery. So if the equivalence of bravery and stupidity holds credence then we could define glory as either stupidity plus fortune or merit plus opportunity. As Napoleon also said, “Ability is of little account without opportunity.” Even the best need a little bit of luck, or they need to at least not be cursed. If we are elite then we are given two choices. We can play it safe, take few risks and expect to reside in upper mediocrity, or we can take the endless risks and have a chance to be the greatest. I don't think that any of the sources of the quotes ignore the non-elite. I believe they would argue that the non-elite can and should make the same risk to be greater than their talents deserve: to beat themselves. But I think the sources are specifically implying that if you are elite and choose to remain in mediocrity then you're the least virtuous. To pass up on a chance at greatness, no matter how small the chance, is despicable, since for most people there is no amount of opportunity that in conjunction with their ability will result in true glory.

Such a theory is hinted at in the episode of Red Dwarf, "The Inquisitor", that I've always found intriguing. In it, the Inquisitor is said to be an agent who lived until the end of the universe and somehow invented a time machine. He then decided that only he could give life a purpose by acting upon his theory of the virtuous life. So he goes back in time to every person who has ever lived and if their lives are deemed worthy they are allowed to remain actual. If not then he deletes them from actuality and they are replaced by one of their inactual counterparts. The intriguing part is that for every person he generates a psychological clone and has the clone judge the original. Each person judges themselves as to whether they succeeded enough in life given the ability and opportunity they were given. Both of those facts we regard as being pre-determined though, or at least they are out of our own control. So it seems unfair to judge somebody on two facts that were out of their control. There must be a third factor then, akin to effort. The question then becomes, given the abilities you were born with, and the opportunity (luck) that befell you, have you tried hard enough? What you have achieved ought to be a direct function of these three factors. Those who I think the sources condemn are those whose ability was abundant and who didn't take the necessary risks, didn't try hard enough to fulfill what they could have fulfilled. Even those who were technically rational, those who settled for upper mediocrity rather than take the gamble between greatness and absolute failure (death), are to be condemned. In fact those who died trying to achieve more than their ability, desire and luck could produce are often celebrated: people like Ned Kelly, Guy Fawkes, Donald Campbell, William Wallace, Harold Godwinsson, Hector and Achilles of the Iliad, the Red Baron and Wat Tyler. I'm tempted to include Admiral Nelson but it's possible that he achieved exactly what he wanted, including his death. Sometimes these people are more celebrated than those whose successes were absolute and still lived to tell the tale, like Churchill, Wellington, Odysseus, Thomas Cochrane and Marshal Bernadotte. Maybe it is because these people never experienced the sensation of ultimate sacrifice, even if they were more than prepared for it. Or maybe it is because we can't be sure that the successful ones really tried as hard as their limits allowed. They probably did but we can't be sure. Maybe Calzaghe and Mayweather each could have been regarded as the greatest boxer ever had they continued to fight. Ricky Hatton, who has been defeated once, might be thought to be probably more glorious by Napoleon because he fought a boxer beyond his ability, effort and luck, his ability was finally quantified and he would be judged to have put in more than an acceptable amount of effort to be the greatest.

It's also worth keeping in mind that three of the people these quotes are attributed to were emperors. That they were willing to risk everything to get to the top ought to tell you that they would have these sorts of opinions, and it suggests if anything that these opinions are the result of imbalanced mental states. Quite a lot of their possible counterparts that failed at an early stage we would probably mock as being rather silly people. These people would prefer to probably look rather silly than actually be unfulfilled and timid.

I haven't really got any further to working out whether these quotes are true. Such is the problem of ethics. There just aren't enough justified premises to make arguments with. Moore's Open Question Argument pretty much puts an end to any objective account of morality. All of these quotes appear to be merely expressions of the preferences of risk-seeking people. We're subjected to more aphorisms that express that attitude because history is filled with successful people who are far more likely to be naturally risk-seeking than not and who got the opportunity to say what they believe publicly, and even though the majority of common people do not share the attitude, they do share a respect for it, and a respect for the people who have it. So we enjoy the content of quotes like:

"It is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees",

much more than we enjoy the content of quotes like:

"Better safe than sorry",

even if we really agree more with quotes like the latter. I suppose like most moral issues, any truth of the matter about whether these quotes are correct is down to personal preference, or they aren't even truth-apt. But they sound cool.