What Did Napoleon Call the Worst Way to Live?

David Senra, reading The Mind of Napoleon, says the worst way to live is to wake up not knowing what to do, drag a tedious existence from place to place, and see nothing ahead but dreadful monotony, one day the same as the next. A man who then asks why he exists is, in the book's words as Senra reads them, the most wretched of all.

The same letters treat every suicide as a mistake. A man who breaks down under the weight of present evils and ends his life commits a grave injustice toward himself, yielding through despair and weakness to a momentary mood at the expense of his entire future existence.

Senra ties those letters to a repeated saying in the book. Live and die with no trace that you existed, and you did not live at all. The saying is a demand not to be timid.