The pursuit of happiness is doomed to fail, not because no one can be happy, but because no one can be happy by trying to be. Each new land that Alexander the Great conquered, instead of satisfying him, merely widened the circumference of his desires. Meanwhile in Macedon, his servants kept the stables, made love to their wives, and never dreamt of Persia's riches. Happiness is the pursuit of nothing.
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Categories
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- Happiness (11)
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Mr. Stanley’s Aphorisms and Paradoxes are outstanding examples of the long-form aphorism...
inevitably studded with discrete individual aphorisms that could easily stand on their own.
-James Geary, author of The World in a Phrase: A Brief History of the Aphorism
Titles - All
- Marital Happiness through Morbidity
- Division Forges Unity
- Children as Run-of-the-Mill Miracles
- Success Leads to Failure
- Traveling is One Experience in Many Locations
- Time Scatters the Remains of History
- The Labor of Vacation
- Trips Without Traveling
- The Confusion of Tongues
- The Double Bind of Political Fame
- The Empty Cathedrals of Europe
- The Risk of Writing Comedy
- Everything is Interesting
- Stammering Toward Eloquence
- Our Ambitions Tyrannize Us
- In Envy of Unhappiness
- We Live Out the Whims of Youth
- Obesity and Depression
- On the Phrase "Passed Away"
- Indulging Folly
- Consumers Mistake the New for the Necessary
- Gift-Giving as Zero-Sum Game
- Our Loves Spill Over
- Shopping As Charity For Corporations
- Love's Osmosis
- Vanity Despite Obscurity
- Bias for the Last
- Death is Green
- Great Cities in Retirement
- The Self-Rebuttal of Anger
- Portrait of the Critic in Three Stages
- Against Living in the Present
- The Conservation of Ourselves
- Morning Depression
- Newborn Mortals
- Fellowship or Freedom
- The History of the Present
- Sea-Longing and Sea-Sickness
- The Deserted End of the Demand Curve
- A Hobby is Work for Work's Sake
- The Friendship of Missionaries
- Counterproductive Passions
- A Meaningful Career As a Professor of Meaninglessness
- The Beauty of Blemishes
- Materialism is for the Soul
- We Love Songs More in Public
- Eras Die With the Elderly
- The Mutability of Children
- A Heaven of Contradictions
- The Famous Then Forgotten Dead
- Repression Makes Sex Interesting
- Activity and Depression
- Full Schedules Make Empty Lives
- Mozart as Elevator Music
- Free Time, Money, and Health
- The Poignancy of the Particular
- Modern Astronomy is Behind the Times
- City Rudeness
- Getting Dead and Being Dead
- The Unlegislative Branch
- Life is High-Maintenance
- War Above Water
- Travel Proves the Merits of Home
- Waking to Weather
- Originality Through Borrowing
- The Plains
- Time Passes So Quickly Because It Passes So Slowly
- The Hell of Heaven
- On Cars Stopping for Funeral Processions
- We Turn Into Trash
- Life at Sea is Spacious and Cramped
- Abstinence as Abortion
- The Potential Energy of Despair
- The Cosmos of Thought
- The Vegas of Voting Booths
- The Pursuit of Happiness
- Outliving Your Lover
- Why Youth Feels Immortal
- We Love Our Life in the Wrong Order
- Sex and Suburbia
- Missionaries and Genocide
- The Missionary's God
- The Afterlife of Organ Donors
- Evaporating the Dead
- Theology of the Empty Universe
- Music Moves the Young and Old
- Medieval Moderns
- Atheism and Computers
- Fireworks Can Convince Us of Any Cause
- Rural Density
- The Errant Power of Politicians
- The Pleasure of Talking to Oneself
- Memento Mori
- The Wilderness No Longer Feels Wild
- Luxury is Multiplying the Basics
- We Have Never Seen Our Faces
- Ignorant Authors
- We Were Gold Medalists in the Sperm Olympics
- The Rarity of Room Temperature
- We are Conquerors of Space but Captives of Time
- Modern Gold Rushes
- The Comedy of Sports
- False Apologies
- The Nouveau Pretty
- Election Campaigns, Then and Now
- Crying Ladies as Philosophers
- A Diamond is Only a Rock Without Someone to Wear It
- The Melodrama of Young Writers
- Turning Time's Corner at Twenty-Seven
- An Insect Crawling on My Book
- The Sublime and Beautiful in Yosemite Valley
- Only the Loner Can Study the Crowd
- The Paradox of Sexual Liberation
- Nazism and Me
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