14. A goodly person possessed of life, mind, intellect and self-consciousness and its occupations, is of no avail to the unwise, but seem to be his over-loadings as those upon a porter.
15. The discontented mind is the great arena of all evils, and the nestling place of diseases which alight upon it like birds of the air: such a life is the abode of toil and misery.
16. As a house is slowly dilapidated by the mice continually burrowing under it, so is the body of the living gradually corroded by the (pernicious) teeth of time boring within it.
17. Deadly diseases bred within the body, feed upon our vital breath, as poisonous snakes born in caves of the woods consume the meadow air.
18. As the withered tree is perforated by minutest worms residing in them, so are our bodies continually wasted by many inborn diseases and noxious secretions.
19. Death is incessantly staring and growling at our face, as a cat looks and purrs at the mouse in order to devour it.
20. Old age wastes us as soon as a glutton digests his food; and it reduces one to weakness as an old harlot, by no other charm than her paint and perfumes.
21. Youth forsakes us as soon, as a good man abandons his wicked friend in disgust, after his foibles come to be known to him in a few days.
22. Death the lover of destruction, and friend of old age and ruin, likes the sensual man, as a lecher likes a beauty.
23. Thus there is nothing so worthless in the world as this life, which is devoid of every good quality and ever subject to death, unless it is attended by the permanent felicity of emancipation.