quotations about pleasure
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"
Your partner's pleasure is your pleasure.
JUDY FORD & RACHEL GREENE BALDINO
The Complete Idiot's Guide to Enhancing Sexual Desire
We are so constituted that we can gain intense pleasure only from the contrast, and only very little from the condition itself.
SIGMUND FREUD
Civilization and Its Discontents
Pleasure is the business of the young, business the pleasure of the old.
FULKE GREVILLE
Maxims, Characters and Reflections
Passive pleasure is no pleasure at all.
ARTHUR ADAMOV
Ping Pong
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
Pleasure's a sin, and sometimes sin's a pleasure.
LORD BYRON
Don Juan
Pleasure is the flower that fades, remembrance is the lasting perfume.
BRUCE LEE
Jeet Kune Do: Bruce Lee's Commentaries on the Martial Way
During the course of our life we now and then enjoy some pleasures so inviting, and have some encounters of so tender a nature, that though they are forbidden, it is but natural to wish that they were at least allowable. Nothing can be more delightful, except it be to abandon them for virtue's sake.
JEAN DE LA BRUYÈRE
"Of the Affections", Les Caractères
True pleasures are paid for in advance; false pleasures afterwards, with heavy and compound interest.
JOHN LUBBOCK
Peace and Happiness
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
Every act by which pleasure is reaped, without any result of pain, is pure gain to happiness; every act whose results of pain are less than the results of pleasure, is good, to the extent of the balance in favour of happiness.
JEREMY BENTHAM
Deontology
All pleasures sicken, and all glories sink:
Each has his share; and who would more obtain,
Shall find the pleasure pays not half the pain.
ALEXANDER POPE
Essay on Man
Pleasure is a river running to the sea; happiness is the full, calm sea.
PETER KREEFT
Heaven: The Heart's Deepest Longing
The progression of pleasures is from the distich to the quatrain, from the quatrain to the sonnet, from the sonnet to the ballad, from the ballad to the ode, from the ode to the cantata, from the cantata to the dithyramb. The husband who commences with dithyramb is a fool.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
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
The fact that all animals and men pursue pleasure is some indication that it is in some way the highest good.
ARISTOTLE
Nicomachean Ethics
He who takes his fill of every pleasure ... becomes depraved; while he who avoids all pleasures alike ... becomes insensible.
ARISTOTLE
Nicomachean Ethics
The choicest pleasures of life lie within the ring of moderation.
MARTIN FARQUHAR TUPPER
Proverbial Philosophy
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