If we sometimes amused ourselves by considering ourselves, and the time we take to counter-regulate others and to recognize the things that are outside us, if we used it to examine ourselves, we would easily feel how all our structure is built of weak and failing parts. Is it not a singular testimony to imperfection, not to be able to base our contentment on anything, and that, by desire and imagination, it is beyond our power to choose that which we need? To what end bears witness this great dispute that has always been between the Philosophers to find the supreme good of man, and which still lasts and will last forever, without resolution and without agreement:
While that which we desire is absent, it seems to be in abundancel Otherwise; after something else has happened, we desire it, And thirst holds us in balance. (Lucretius)
Whatever comes to our knowledge and enjoyment, we feel that it does not satisfy us, and we go on to look for things to come and things unknown, since the present ones never satisfy us: not, in my opinion, that they do not have enough to worry us, but it is that we seize them with a sick and disordered grip,
For when he saw here, for the use that use demands, that almost everything was now prepared for mortals, that men were powerful in wealth and honor and praise, that the reputation of their children was excellent, that no one at home had less anxious hearts, and that his mind was forced to serve with angry complaints: he understood that vice was making the vessel itself, and that everything within would be corrupted by his vice, whatever advantages and advantages might come from outside. (Lucretius)
Our appetite is irresolute and uncertain: it knows neither how to hold on to anything nor how to enjoy anything in the right way. Man, believing this to be the vice of these things, fills himself and satisfies himself with other things that he does not know and does not recognize, where he applies his desires and his hopes, takes them in honor and reverence: as Caesar says,
It is a common defect of nature that we trust more and are more intensely terrified by unseen, hidden, and unknown things.