"So all these paths that we think may lead to happiness are false trails and cannot take us to where we want to go. And as I shall demonstrate, they lead in wrong and even wicked directions. Do you want to pile up large sums of money? Where will you get it, if not from those who have it? You want honors? How will you obtain them except by begging for them from those who can bestow them, thereby becoming not the proud man you wanted to be but a suppliant, a mendicant? You want power? You will lie awake at night worrying about your subjects’ treachery. You want glory and fame? You will be the toy of vicissitude, trying to figure out the mood of the people and drawn this way and that by their fickle preferences. You want pleasure? You become the servant of your body, which you know to be both frail and base. There are those who take pride in their bodies, but ... why? What man can compare to an elephant in size? Or a bull in strength? Or a tiger in speed? Look up at the heavens and marvel at the steadiness and the speed of the stars and constellations and then think of the puniness of the human body. And what is impressive in the sky is not just the speed but the order, the regularity those bodies display. The human body can be beautiful, but its beauty passes like that of spring flowers. And think of Aristotle’s observation that if we had the keenness of sight of Lynceus the Argonaut and could see through surfaces, the beauty even of an Alcibiades would be a disgusting heap of guts and organs. It isn’t the human body, then, that is attractive, but only the weakness of human vision that makes it seem so. And anyway, however beautiful a human body may be, that beauty can be utterly destroyed in the course of a three-day fever. So we see that all these things do not provide the happiness they promise, nor can they lead us to any kind of perfection, singly or in combination. They cannot make men happy.”

Alas, how blind are men who stumble along the wrong path!
They hope to find gold and jewels hanging in trees.
They cast their nets wide and fish on the mountaintops,
or they try to hunt for wild goats out on the sea.
Oh, they know where to dive for pearls and where the murex dwells,
the source of our precious purple dye.
They can find shellfish
but they cannot begin to locate the good that looms high up over the earth on which they tread.
They are hopeless fools in endless pursuit of money and fame.
When they have reached their worthless goals they will come to know how far they went wrong.