(39.) When we are sighing for the loss of our past blooming youth, which will return no more, let us think that decrepitude will come, when we shall regret the mature age we have reached and do not sufficiently value.
(40.) The fear of old age disturbs us, yet we are not certain of becoming old.
(41.) We hope to grow old, and yet we dread old age; or, in other words, we are willing to live, and afraid to die.
(42.) A man had better yield to nature and fear death, than be engaged in continual conflicts, provide himself with arguments and reflections, and be always combating his own feelings in order not to fear it.
(43.) If some persons died, and others did not die, death would indeed be a terrible affliction.
(44.) A long disease seems to be a halting-place between life and death, that death itself may be a comfort to those who die and to those who are left behind.
(45.) Humanly speaking, there is something good in death, namely, that it puts an end to old age. That death which prevents decrepitude comes more seasonably than that which ends it.
(46.) Men regret their life has been ill-spent, but this does not always induce them to make a better use of the time they have yet to live.
(47.) Life is a kind of sleep; old men have slept longer than others, and only begin to wake again when they are to die. If, then, they take a retrospect of the whole course of their lives, they frequently discover neither virtues nor commendable actions to distinguish one year from another; they confound one time of their life with another time, and see nothing of sufficient note by which to measure how long they have lived. They have dreamt in a confused, indistinct, and incoherent way; but, nevertheless, they are aware, as all people who wake up, that they have slept for a long while.