Verse 24

²⁴Wandering by my works, I was brought as it happened to this world of men, which is the door to heaven and to release, and the door to the animal births, and back again to this one. ²⁵And here too I watched husbands and wives doing their work for happiness and to drive off what hurts them, and I saw the opposite come of it, and I turned away. ²⁶Happiness is the very shape of this self, and the ceasing of all striving is its body. Having seen that pleasures are born of the mind touching things, I shall lie down and sleep. ²⁷Forgetting this good of his own, which is there all the while, a man in the unreal world of two comes to a round of birth that is many coloured and terrible.

²⁸An ignorant man wanting water leaves the water that the plants growing in it have covered, and runs after a mirage. So it is with one who looks for his good anywhere but in himself. ²⁹A man seeks happiness for himself and an end of pain through the body and the rest, which are in the hands of fate and not in his; and so the things he does are done and done again for nothing. ³⁰A mortal is never let go by the pains that rise in himself and by the others. What is he to do with wealth and pleasures that came to him only through hard labour?