According to Greek legends, the gods ordered Prometheus, a titan, to create humans out of clay. While his brother, Epimetheus, created all the animals.

Orestes being pursued by the Furies,
By William-Adolphe Bouguereau

It's from an ancient Greek tragedy, following Agamemnon's son, Orestes, after the events of the Illiad.

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Human life is mysterious that way. Human beings aren't strong enough to live and die only for themselves. That's why we have ideals, we can only act for the sake of something. We soon tire of living only for ourselves. It necessarily follows that we also need to die for something. That something used to be called a "noble cause." To die for a noble cause was thought the most glorious, heroic, or honorable way to die. But there are no noble causes today. Democratic governments obviously have no need for noble causes. Yet if one cannot find a value that transcends oneself, life itself, in a spiritual sense, is rendered meaningless.

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When a boy… discovers that he is more given into introspection and consciousness of self than other boys his age, he easily falls into the error of believing it is because he is more mature than they. This was certainly a mistake in my case. Rather, it was because the other boys had no such need of understanding themselves as I had: they could be their natural selves, whereas I was to play a part, a fact that would require considerable understanding and study. So it was not my maturity but my sense of uneasiness, my uncertainty that was forcing me to gain control over my consciousness. Because such consciousness was simply a steppingstone to aberration and my present thinking was nothing but uncertain and haphazard guesswork

— Confessions of a mask, by Yukio Mishima

"At Rest" by Alex Venezia

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Unlike need, which can be satisfied, desire can never be satisfied: it is constant in its pressure and eternal. For Jacques Lacan, the attainment of desire does not consist in being fulfilled but in its reproduction as such. As Slavoj Žižek puts it, "desire's raison d'être is not to realize its goal, to find full satisfaction, but to reproduce itself as desire."