Every man is rich or poor, according to the proportion between his desires and enjoyments; any enlargement of wishes is therefore equally destructive to happiness with the diminution of possession; and he that teaches another to long for what he shall never obtain, is no less an enemy to his quiet, than if he had robbed him of part of his patrimony.
—Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), The Rambler, # 163. Cited in the New York Review of Books, 8 October 2009
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