quotations about pleasure
As to the lawful pleasures of the mind, the heart, or the senses, indulge in them with gratitude and moderation, drawing up sometimes in order to punish yourself, without waiting to be forced to do so by necessity.
HENRI-DOMINIQUE LACORDAIRE
Letters to Young Men
Men seek but one thing in life--their pleasure.... You rear like a frightened colt, because I use a word to which your Christianity ascribes a deprecatory meaning. You have a hierarchy of values; pleasure is at the bottom of the ladder, and you speak with a little thrill of self-satisfaction, of duty, charity, and truthfulness. You think pleasure is only of the senses; the wretched slaves who manufactured your morality despised a satisfaction which they had small means of enjoying. You would not be so frightened if I had spoken of happiness instead of pleasure: it sounds less shocking, and your mind wanders from the sty of Epicurus to his garden. But I will speak of pleasure, for I see that men aim at that, and I do not know that they aim at happiness. It is pleasure that lurks in the practice of every one of your virtues. Man performs actions because they are good for him, and when they are good for other people as well they are thought virtuous: if he finds pleasure in giving alms he is charitable; if he finds pleasure in helping others he is benevolent; if he finds pleasure in working for society he is public-spirited; but it is for your private pleasure that you give twopence to a beggar as much as it is for my private pleasure that I drink another whiskey and soda. I, less of a humbug than you, neither applaud myself for my pleasure nor demand your admiration.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM
Of Human Bondage
Do you, like a skilful weigher, put into the balance the pleasures and the pains, near and distant, and weigh them, and then say which outweighs the other? If you weigh pleasures against pleasures, you of course take the more and greater; or if you weigh pains against pains, then you choose that course of action in which the painful is exceeded by the pleasant, whether the distant by the near or the near by the distant; and you avoid that course of action in which the pleasant is exceeded by the painful.
PLATO
Protagoras
The pleasure of any incident, whether it is of a sunset, or sexual, or any sensory pleasure, is recorded and thought over. So thought as pleasure plays a tremendous part in our life. Something happened yesterday which was a most lovely thing, a most happy event, it is recorded; thought comes upon it, chews it and keeps on thinking about it and wants it repeated tomorrow, whether it be sexual or otherwise. So thought gives vitality to an incident that is over.
JIDDU KRISHNAMURTI
The Awakening of Intelligence
Oh righteous doom, that they who make
Pleasure their only end,
Ordering the whole life for its sake,
Miss that whereto they tend.
While they who bid stern duty lead,
Content to follow, they,
Of duty only taking heed,
Find pleasure by the way.
RICHARD CHENEVIX TRENCH
"Retribution"
Pleasure's a sin, and sometimes sin's a pleasure.
LORD BYRON
Don Juan
Pleasure is a river running to the sea; happiness is the full, calm sea.
PETER KREEFT
Heaven: The Heart's Deepest Longing
Pleasure is the business of the young, business the pleasure of the old.
FULKE GREVILLE
Maxims, Characters and Reflections
The poor have very few hours in which to enjoy themselves; they must take their pleasure raw; they haven't the time to cook it.
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
Where There Is Nothing
Ever let the Fancy roam,
Pleasure never is at home.
JOHN KEATS
"Fancy"
Yet, sluggard, wake, and gull thy soul no more
With earth's false pleasures, and the world's delight,
Whose fruit is fair and pleasing to the sight,
But sour in taste, false as the putrid core:
Thy flaring glass is gems at her half light;
She makes thee seeming rich, but truly poor:
She boasts a kernel, and bestows a shell;
Performs an inch of her fair-promis'd ell:
Her words protest a heav'n; her works produce a hell.
FRANCIS QUARLES
Emblems
For, without love, pleasure withers quickly, becomes a foul taste on the palate, and pleasure's inventions are soon exhausted.
JAMES BALDWIN
Just Above My Head
True pleasures are paid for in advance; false pleasures afterwards, with heavy and compound interest.
JOHN LUBBOCK
Peace and Happiness
In the life of man there are no two moments of pleasure exactly alike, any more than there are two leaves of identical shape upon the same tree.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
Pleasure believes in friends, pleasure creates communities, pleasure crumbles faces into smiles, pleasure links hand in hand, pleasure restores, pain is the most selfish thing.
DELMORE SCHWARTZ
"Pleasure", Selected Poems (1938-1958): Summer Knowledge
Your partner's pleasure is your pleasure.
JUDY FORD & RACHEL GREENE BALDINO
The Complete Idiot's Guide to Enhancing Sexual Desire
The search for pleasure is circular, repetitive, atemporal. The variety seeking of the spectator, the thrill hunter, the sexually promiscuous, always ends in the same place. It has an end. It comes to the end and has to start over. It is not a journey and return, but a closed cycle, a locked room, a cell.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Dispossessed
Pleasure is labour too, and tires as much.
WILLIAM COWPER
Hope
Pleasure is not a thing, but a sensation caused by the fitting together of desire and accomplishment. There is such a thing as honey, but there is no such thing as sweetness, until contact takes place between the tongue and some object capable of imparting to the gustative papillae that sensation which we call sweetness. For moralists, therefore, to rail against pleasure is as irrational as it would be for physicians to warn people against sweetness; there are wholesome things that taste sweet as well as unwholesome, there are noble and holy sources of pleasure as well as ignoble and unclean. In pursuing pleasure men are trying to grasp a phantom--in declaiming against it they are beating the air; the important thing is what is the nature of desire? For it is of the union of desire and accomplishment that pleasure is born, and the nature of the offspring depends on its parentage.
HERBERT MAXWELL
Littell's Living Age, March 12, 1892
Pain or pleasure? I say pleasure.
EPICTETUS
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