quotations about pleasure
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
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
Passive pleasure is no pleasure at all.
ARTHUR ADAMOV
Ping Pong
The choicest pleasures of life lie within the ring of moderation.
MARTIN FARQUHAR TUPPER
Proverbial Philosophy
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
Pleasure, like a kind of bait, is thrown before everything which is really bad, and easily allures greedy souls to the hook of perdition.
EPICTETUS
Fragments
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
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
Pleasure is the business of the young, business the pleasure of the old.
FULKE GREVILLE
Maxims, Characters and Reflections
Pleasure's a sin, and sometimes sin's a pleasure.
LORD BYRON
Don Juan
Pleasure cannot be shared; like Pain, it can only be experienced or inflicted, and when we give Pleasure to our Lovers or bestow Charity upon the Needy, we do so, not to gratify the object of our Benevolence, but only ourselves. For the Truth is that we are kind for the same reason as we are cruel, in order that we may enhance the sense of our own Power.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
After Many a Summer Dies the Swan
True pleasures are paid for in advance; false pleasures afterwards, with heavy and compound interest.
JOHN LUBBOCK
Peace and Happiness
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
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
The more we go in the direction of Essence and away from the ego, the more pleasure we experience, because pleasure is largely dependent on how present we are to whatever we are doing. Anything can be pleasurable if we are present to it without the interference of the egoic mind. The simplest things are pleasurable when we are present to them, even things we generally don't like. Being present is one of the secrets to happiness. The more we drop out of our egoic mind and into our senses, the more pleasure our senses deliver. Pleasure actually points the way Home.
GINA LAKE
What About Now?
Many know how to please, but know not when they have ceased to give pleasure.
ARTHUR HELPS
Thoughts in the Cloister and the Crowd
Pleasure is a hedonistic reflex, a burning impulse to abandon rational thought altogether and immerse oneself in the moment.
GENE WALLENSTEIN
The Pleasure Instinct
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 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