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Posted by Kamala on January 14, 2008, 8:16 pm
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of pleasures.
The king is surrounded by persons whose only thought is to divert the king
and to prevent his thinking of self. For he is unhappy, king though he be,
if he think of himself.
This is all that men have been able to discover to make themselves happy.
And those who philosophise on the matter, and who think men unreasonable for
spending a whole day in chasing a hare which they would not have bought,
scarce know our nature. The hare in itself would not screen us from the
sight of death and calamities; but the chase, which turns away our attention
from these, does screen us.
The advice given to Pyrrhus, to take the rest which he was about to seek
with so much labour, was full of difficulties.
To bid a man live quietly is to bid him live happily. It is to advise him to
be in a state perfectly happy, in which he can think at leisure without
finding therein a cause of distress. This is to misunderstand nature.
As men who naturally understand their own condition avoid nothing so much as
rest, so there is nothing they leave undone in seeking turmoil. Not that
they have an instinctive knowledge of true happiness...
So we are wrong in blaming them. Their error does not lie in seeking
excitement, if they seek it only as a diversion; the evil is that they seek
it as if the possession of the objects of their quest would make them really
happy. In this respect it is right to call their quest a vain one. Hence in
all this both the censurers and the censured do not understand man's true
nat
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