He who hurries through life hurries to his grave.

The aphorism warns that a life lived in constant haste is self-defeating: rushing compresses experience, increases risk, and can shorten one’s life—literally through stress and recklessness, or figuratively by forfeiting reflection and meaning. Read as moral counsel, it urges patience and deliberation over frantic striving, suggesting that the obsession with speed (achievement, travel, ambition) can become a kind of slow self-destruction. At a broader level, it echoes a common theme in proverbial wisdom: mortality is inevitable, so accelerating one’s pace does not “outrun” death; it only brings one closer to it without having truly lived.