When I look at my wedding photo, I am amazed that such an important decision as who to spend my life with was made by someone so young. The life I live now, albeit happily, is not the life that I, but this baby face, chose. With age we get wiser, but our green and innocent selves have already made life's great decisions. A doctor labors for forty years at a career he chose as a college sophomore. A fifty-year old smokes because a fifteen-year old wanted to try it. Decision is brief, and consequence long. Five minutes of pleasure leads to parenthood. Moments determine decades.
We Live Out the Whims of Youth
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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