Reflect on this, and
remember that should the ill come upon you, you will have yourself to
thank, for it is your own choice to be born, and there is no compulsion
in the matter.
"Not that we deny the existence of pleasures among mankind; there is a
certain show of sundry phases of contentment which may even amount to
very considerable happiness; but mark how they are distributed over a
man's life, belonging, all the keenest of them, to the fore part, and few
indeed to the after. Can there be any pleasure worth purchasing with the
miseries of a decrepit age? If you are good, strong, and handsome, you
have a fine fortune indeed at twenty, but how much of it will be left at
sixty? For you must live on your capital; there is no investing your
powers so that you may get a small annuity of life for ever: you must eat
up your principal bit by bit, and be tortured by seeing it grow
continually smaller and smaller, even though you happen to escape being
rudely robbed of it by crime or casualty.
"Remember, too, that there never yet was a man of forty who would not
come back into the world of the unborn if he could do so with decency and
honour. Being in the world he will as a general rule stay till he is
forced to go; but do you think that he would consent to be born again,
and re-live his life, if he had the offer of doing so? Do not think it.
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