This personality, this sense of self, is a cruel deception and a snare.

Realize once the true soul behind it, devoid of attributes, therefore without this capacity for suffering, an indivisible part of the great impersonal soul of nature: then, and then only, will you have found happiness in the blissful quiescence of Nirvana.
With a certain poetic fitness, misery and impersonality were both present in the occasion that gave the belief birth.

Many have turned to the consolations of religion by reason of their own wretchedness; Gautama sought its help touched by the woes of others whom, in his own happy life journey, he chanced one day to come across.

Shocked by the sight of human disease, old age, and death, sad facts to which hitherto he had been sedulously kept a stranger, he renounced the world that he might find for it an escape from its ills.

But bliss, as he conceived it, lay not in wanting to be something he was not, but in actual want of being.