Pleasure Quotes

I didn’t hear words that were accurate, much less prideful. For example, I never once heard the word clitoris. It would be years before I learned that females possessed the only organ in the human body with no function than to feel pleasure. (If such an organ were unique to the male body, can you imagine how much we would hear about it—and what it would be used to justify?)

~ Gloria Steinem

Most sexually adventurous women want a man who regards cunnilingus as a basic woman right.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Pleasure feels better than pain. Make the pursuit of pleasure your guide.

~ Sharon Weil

That pleasure which is at once the most pure, the most elevating and the most intense, is derived, I maintain, from the contemplation of the beautiful.

~ Edgar Allan Poe

Where is our comfort but in the free, uninvolved, finally mysterious beauty and grace of this world that we did not make, that has no price? Where is our sanity but there? Where is our pleasure but in working and resting kindly in the presence of this world? (pg. 215, Economy and Pleasure)

~ Wendell Berry

The philosophical study of beauty, art, and the splendor of nature nurtures a person’s fertile mind by exposing a person to the puzzling world of the beautiful, elegant, ugly, and grotesque. Human beings ability to experience sublime pleasure emanates from a variety of sensory experiences and a person’s ability to make discriminatory observations and judgment in taste and sentiment.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Then there are the fully intentional pleasures, which, although in some way tied up with sensory or perceptual experience, are modes of exploration of the world. Aesthetic pleasures are like this. Aesthetic pleasures are contemplative - they involve studying an object OUTSIDE of the self, to which one is GIVING something (namely, attention and all that flows from it), and not TAKING, as in the pleasure that comes from drugs and drinks. Hence such pleasures are not addictive - there is no pathway to reward that can be short-circuited here, and a serotonin injection is not a cheap way of obtaining the experience of PARISFAL or THE MERCHANT OF VENICE.

~ Roger Scruton

What is the beauty of a thing if others do not take pleasure in it.

~ Gerald Mills

More and more, we take for granted that work must be destitute of pleasure. More and more, we assume that if we want to be pleased we must wait until evening, or the weekend, or vacation, or retirement. More and more, our farms and forests resemble our factories and offices, which in turn more and more resemble prisons—why else should we be so eager to escape them? We recognize defeated landscapes by the absence of pleasure from them. We are defeated at work because our work gives us no pleasure. We are defeated at home because we have no pleasant work there. We turn to the pleasure industries for relief from our defeat, and are again defeated, for the pleasure industries can thrive and grow only upon our dissatisfaction with them.Where is our comfort but in the free, uninvolved finally mysterious beauty and grace of this world that we did not make, that has no price? Where is our sanity but there? Where is our pleasure but in working and resting kindly in the presence of this world?

~ Wendell Berry

When God laughs at the soul and the soul laughs back at God, the persons of the Trinity are begotten. When the Father laughs at the Son and the Son laughs back at the Father, that laughter gives pleasure, that pleasure gives joy, that joy gives love, and that love is the Holy Spirit.

~ Meister Eckhart

The state of no being, knows neither pleasure nor pain. It is purely divine.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Oftentimes in denying yourself pleasure you do but store the desire in the recesses of your being.Who knows but that which seems omitted today, waits for tomorrow?Even your body knows its heritage and its rightful need and will not be deceived.And your body is the harp of your soul,And it is yours to bring forth sweet music from it or confused sounds.

~ Kahlil Gibran

As long as one is involved in worldly interactions, there is pleasure of the mind; and after knowing the Self (Soul), there is bliss of the Soul.

~ Dada Bhagwan

Leaders do not chase comfort, they pursue vision even if it comes with risks. Don’t give up too early because you see not early rewards.

~ Israelmore Ayivor

... food is not simply organic fuel to keep body and soul together, it is a perishable art that must be savoured at the peak of perfection.

~ E.a. Bucchianeri

A child's reading is guided by pleasure, but his pleasure is undifferentiated; he cannot distinguish, for example, between aesthetic pleasure and the pleasures of learning or daydreaming. In adolescence we realize that there are different kinds of pleasure, some of which cannot be enjoyed simultaneously, but we need help from others in defining them. Whether it be a matter of taste in food or taste in literature, the adolescent looks for a mentor in whose authority he can believe. He eats or reads what his mentor recommends and, inevitably, there are occasions when he has to deceive himself a little; he has to pretend that he enjoys olives or War and Peace a little more than he actually does. Between the ages of twenty and forty we are engaged in the process of discovering who we are, which involves learning the difference between accidental limitations which it is our duty to outgrow and the necessary limitations of our nature beyond which we cannot trespass with impunity. Few of us can learn this without making mistakes, without trying to become a little more of a universal man than we are permitted to be. It is during this period that a writer can most easily be led astray by another writer or by some ideology. When someone between twenty and forty says, apropos of a work of art, 'I know what I like,'he is really saying 'I have no taste of my own but accept the taste of my cultural milieu', because, between twenty and forty, the surest sign that a man has a genuine taste of his own is that he is uncertain of it. After forty, if we have not lost our authentic selves altogether, pleasure can again become what it was when we were children, the proper guide to what we should read.

~ W.h. Auden

Never force yourself to read a book that you do not enjoy. There are so many good books in the world that it is foolish to waste time on one that does not give you pleasure.

~ Atwood H. Townsend

How pleasant it is to spend an evening in this way! I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading!”“Spoken like one who has never known the ecstasy of holding a still-beating heart in her hand.

~ Seth Grahame-Smith

If Barthes, along with Bachelard, is one of those who have done most to enrich criticism during the last thirty years, it is not as a theoretician of a still hazy semiology, but as the champion of a new pleasure in reading.

~ Laurent Binet

Reading is important. It’s not primarily escapism (though it can be, and there’s nothing wrong with some of that in good measure) and it’s not primarily a way of passing the time. Reading is important to the good life because it stokes the furnaces of our intellect, allows us to expand our understanding of the universe, both inner and outer, for practical gain and simple pleasure. It can induce awe, inspire respect, excite, piss off, and intrigue. These are things that make life worth living.

~ Robert Wringham

Reading is for pleasure, it’s not another form of social competition. Leave those literary Joneses to it.

~ Heather Reyes

School children, who have enjoyed reading a romance or a detective thriller or a novel about terror and conquest, make the invariable mistake of studying literature in the college. They make the mistake of learning theory in place of art; they acquire impediments in their own enjoyment of the books by allowing a set of theories to govern their own reading.

~ Anuradha Bhattacharyya

who gets the rare opportunity of spotting a treasure of memories lying among masses, stepping back to stroke it with a secret smile as your mind wanders back to those sleepless yet ecstatic nights you had spent together?only............a book lover.

~ Nadun Lokuliyanage

The joy of reading is sacred pleasure.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

The worldly life means a factory of pain and pleasure.

~ Dada Bhagwan

Physical pleasures are not associated with attachment-abhorrence, the belief in an opinion itself is attachment-abhorrence.

~ Dada Bhagwan

After getting respect, one will get an equal amount of insult, if not in this life then the next. If you taste even the slightest of pleasure from this body-complex [pudgal], you will have to pay back an equivalent amount. Therefore become attachment-free (vitarag).

~ Dada Bhagwan

Any halfway clever devil would decorate the highway to Hell as beautiful as possible.

~ Criss Jami

...the pleasures of the world are chiefly folly, and the business of it mostly knavery, and both nothing better than vanity; the men of pleasure tearing one another to pieces from the emulation of spending money, and the men of business from envy in getting it.

~ Henry Fielding

I haven’t written you a poem in years it seems.How can it be my faultwhen the words to describe you have not yet been created?When the alphabet lacks the very letters?How can it be my fault when your loveliness only growsby the time I reach for pen and paper?Tell me how I am at faultwhen I am only a beginner in poemsand you are exquisite poetry?To write you in words is to put a veil upon you.Why must I writewhen I can kiss you instead?

~ Kamand Kojouri

Wonderment shared is doubled.Love shared is infinite.

~ Kamand Kojouri

My hours are filled with fantasy and indifference. In day and night dreams, I think of my heaven with you. All the time in between, I carelessly spend in hell without you.

~ Kamand Kojouri

Extremities are flawed. Moderation is ideal, save for one occasion.So damn these eyes that weep too much.This mind that thinks too much. But never this heart that loves too much.

~ Kamand Kojouri

Because even if you spend your life chasing the immaterial, listening to the most exquisite classical music and getting drunk off of stunning vistas of mountains and waterfalls, all of it isn't worth a dime if you aren’t sharing it with someone. Everything amounts to that. True, we must experience most things in solitude to grow, create, destroy and grow again, but our pleasure and joy reaches a threshold in isolation. It is the worst thing to become an island. One must become the whole world.

~ Kamand Kojouri

Oliver did not seem to understand that the only real fulfilment on this earth was to be gained through hard work. Life as a series of momentary pleasures satisfied no one. He needed to make an investment in it, an investment of himself.

~ Julian Fellowes

People go on marrying because they can't resist natural forces, although many of them may know perfectly well that they are possibly buying a month's pleasure with a life's discomfort.

~ Thomas Hardy

Why had peace given place so soon to turmoil? To two separate solitudes? Because peace had been without thought? Without...integrity?How could she have felt like that without love?Was love essential?Did it even exist - the love she had dreamed of her life?If it did, it was too late now for her to find it.Must she make do with this instead, then?Only this?Pleasure without love?

~ Mary Balogh

We live in one of the few epochs of humanity where life isn't just a painful cycle of toil, fatigue, and collapse. Now pleasure gyrates us through those stages.

~ Bauvard

We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must havethe stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthlessfurnace of this world. To make injustice the onlymeasure of our attention is to praise the Devil.

~ Jack Gilbert

Consider the capacity of the human body for pleasure. Sometimes, it is pleasant to eat, to drink, to see, to touch, to smell, to hear, to make love. The mouth. The eyes. The fingertips, The nose. The ears. The genitals. Our voluptific faculties (if you will forgive me the coinage) are not exclusively concentrated here. The whole body is susceptible to pleasure, but in places there are wells from which it may be drawn up in greater quantity. But not inexhaustibly. How long is it possible to know pleasure? Rich Romans ate to satiety, and then purged their overburdened bellies and ate again. But they could not eat for ever. A rose is sweet, but the nose becomes habituated to its scent. And what of the most intense pleasures, the personality-annihilating ecstasies of sex? I am no longer a young man; even if I chose to discard my celibacy I would surely have lost my stamina, re-erecting in half-hours where once it was minutes. And yet if youth were restored to me fully, and I engaged again in what was once my greatest delight – to be fellated at stool by nymphet with mouth still blood-heavy from the necessary precautions – what then? What if my supply of anodontic premenstruals were never-ending, what then? Surely, in time, I should sicken of it.“Even if I were a woman, and could string orgasm on orgasm like beads on a necklace, in time I should sicken of it. Do you think Messalina, in that competition of hers with a courtesan, knew pleasure as much on the first occasion as the last? Impossible.“Yet consider.“Consider pain.“Give me a cubic centimeter of your flesh and I could give you pain that would swallow you as the ocean swallows a grain of salt. And you would always be ripe for it, from before the time of your birth to the moment of your death, we are always in season for the embrace of pain. To experience pain requires no intelligence, no maturity, no wisdom, no slow working of the hormones in the moist midnight of our innards. We are always ripe for it. All life is ripe for it. Always.

~ Jesus I. Aldapuerta