Reasons why we like the chase better than the quarry.

Hence it comes that men so much love noise and stir; hence it comes that
the prison is so horrible a punishment; hence it comes that the pleasure
of solitude is a thing incomprehensible. And it is in fact the greatest
source of happiness in the condition of kings, that men try incessantly
to divert them, and to procure for them all kinds 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.[69]

[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 ...