Source Quotes - page 20
We do not rush toward death, we flee the catastrophe of birth, survivors struggling to forget it. Fear of death is merely the projection into the future of a fear which dates back to our first moment of life. We are reluctant, of course, to treat birth as a scourge: has it not been inculcated as the sovereign good - have we not been told that the worst came at the end, not at the outset of our lives? Yet evil, the real evil, is behind, not ahead of us. What escaped Jesus did not escape Buddha: "If three things did not exist in the world, O disciples, the Perfect One would not appear in the world. ..." And ahead of old age and death he places the fact of birth, source of every infirmity, every disaster.
Emil Cioran
Men, from their early years, are reared in the midst of goods of the body and senses, the source of corrupt behavior, and, because they constantly deal with them, know them better. But spiritual things, the goods of reason, and things intellectual, which are far removed from the senses, they do not know as well. Because they understand and are always dealing with material things, but spiritual things are not so readily evident, it happens that men, for the most part, are plunged into sinful conduct.
Bartolomé de las Casas