We suffer by wanting different things often at odds with one another, but we suffer even more by wanting to want different things.

To get everything you want is not a good thing. Disease makes health seem sweet. Hunger leads to the appreciation of being full-fed. Tiredness creates the enjoyment of resting

All wanting comes from need, therefore from lack, therefore from suffering.

Always having what we want
may not be the best good fortune
Health seems sweetest
after sickness, food
in hunger, goodness
in the wake of evil, and at the end
of daylong labor sleep.

Perhaps our only sickness is to desire a truth which we cannot bear rather than to rest content with the fictions we manufacture out of each other.

And yet these things for which we should strive eagerly, things so closely akin to ourselves, so truly our own, we treat with great slackness and constant indifference and thus destroy the germs of excellence, while those things in which deficiency were a merit we desire with an insatiable yearning.

Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously near to wanting nothing.

Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously close to wanting nothing.

All suffering originates from craving, from attachment, from desire.

The more we desire for that which is superfluous, the more we meet with difficulties; our strength and possessions are spent in unnecessary things, and are wanting when required for that which is necessary.

There are reasons we become ill or dispirited. It's what Oriwia was referring to. There's always a cause. Sometimes we bring sickness or punishment upon ourselves through carelessness, distraction, transgression, or failing to dedicate the day or the task. Weak moments may invite wrong forces.
Sometimes sickness is caused by a vengeful person such as Oriwia describes. I have seen those affected by the spite of others become ill, go mad, become lame, turn black, drop dead, die slowly. I have seen their children born with ailments and deformities. (Chapter 25 p198)

What is a disease is wishing with an equal intensity what is needed and what is desirable, and suffer for not being perfect as you would suffer for not having bread. The romantic error is this wanting the moon as if there was a way to get it.

Desire is craving enough to sacrifice for

Original: O que é doença é desejar com igual intensidade o que é preciso e o que ´desejável, e sofrer por não ser perfeito como se se sofresse por não ter pão. O mal romântico é este: é querer a lua como se houvesse maneira de a obter.