The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of a mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one.
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Quoted by Salinger as a statement of the psychoanalyst Wilhelm Stekel in The Catcher in the Rye, this has often been attributed to Salinger, and it may actually be a paraphrase by him of a statement of the German writer Otto Ludwig (1813-1865) which Stekel himself quotes in his writings
Notes from Wikiquote
Das Höchste, wozu er sich erheben konnte, war, für etwas rühmlich zu sterben; jetzt erhebt er sich zu dem Größern, für etwas ruhmlos zu leben. | The highest he could raise himself to was to die gloriously for something; now he rises to something greater: to live humbly for something. | Gedanken Otto Ludwigs : Aus seinem Nachlaß ausgewählt und herausgegeben von Cordelia Ludwig (1903), p. 10; this is quoted by Stekel in "Die Ausgänge der psychoanalytischen Kuren" in Zentralblatt für Psychoanalyse : Medizinische Monatsschrift für Seelenkunde (1913), p. 188, and in Das liebe Ich : Grundriss einer neuen Diätetik der Seele (1913), page 38.