Pleasure Quotes

Turning an experience about to observe it, results in a lessening of the experience directly proportional to the amount of observation. To think about it is, to some degree, to stop the pleasure, to stop the experience, to step outside it.

~ Geoffrey Wood

Other animals can make sounds, and sounds can indicate pleasure and pain. But language, a distinctly human capacity, isn´t just for registering pleasure and pain. It´s about declaring what is just and what is unjust, and distinguishing right from wrong. We don´t grasp these things silently, and then put words to them; language is the medium through which we discern and deliberate about the good.

~ Michael J. Sandel

Melancholy is the happiness of being sad.

~ Victor Hugo

Was I happy? Maybe more content thanbouncing-off-the-sofa-like-Tom-Cruise-ecstatic, but that’s still happy isn’t it?

~ Lindsey Kelk

To torture a man you have to know his pleasures.

~ Stanisław Lem

People don't think when they're enjoying themselves. Thinking is a sign of disturbance.

~ Marty Rubin

So there is nothing inherently subversive about pleasure. On the contrary, as Karl Marx recognized, it is a thoroughly aristocratic creed. The traditional English gentleman was so averse to unpleasurable labour that he could not even be bothered to articulate properly. Hence the patrician slur and drawl, Aristotle believed that being human was something you had to get good at through constant practice, like learning Catalan or playing the bagpipes; whereas if the English gentleman was virtuous, as he occasionally deigned to be, his goodness was purely spontaneous. Moral effort was for merchants and clerks

~ Terry Eagleton

Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do. On the one hand the standard of right and wrong, on the other the chain of causes and effects, are fastened to their throne. They govern us in all we do, in all we say, in all we think: every effort we can make to throw off our subjection, will serve but to demonstrate and confirm it. In words a man may pretend to abjure their empire: but in reality he will remain subject to it all the while. The principle of utility recognizes this subjection, and assumes it for the foundation of that system, the object of which is to rear the fabric of felicity by the hands of reason and of law. Systems which attempt to question it, deal in sounds instead of sense, in caprice instead of reason, in darkness instead of light.

~ Jeremy Bentham

But if you take pleasure in morality, then you are always in deficit.

~ Brian Castro

Some very common foods and drinks are aversive. Few people enjoy, at first, coffee, beer, tobacco, or chili pepper. Pleasure from pain is uniquely human. No other animal willingly eats such foods when there are alternatives. Philosophers have often looked for the defining feature of humans—language, rationality, culture, and so on. I'd stick with this: Man is the only animal that likes Tabasco sauce.

~ Paul Bloom

I drank, sucking the blood out of the holes, experiencing for the first time since infancy the special pleasure of sucking nourishment, the body focused with the mind upon one vital source.

~ Anne Rice

if only these treasures were not so fragile as they are precious and beautiful.

~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Stolen pleasures are always more thrilling than those come by honestly.

~ Ann Leary

My confessions did nothing to alter this situation, but for the first time in my life I felt that somebody actually knew me. Three somebodies, to be exact. Two were roaming the highway in a Cadillac, doing God knows what with a CB radio, but the other was as close to me as my own skin, and I could now feel the undiluted pleasure of her company.

~ David Sedaris

How we would like to argue with September, and tell her that in the waiting lies the pleasure! That we here in the world of sensible folk know how to wait without twisted-up bellies and tapping feet and wishing for the sun to hurry up and rise and set. That a clever person is never bored, and a bored person is never clever. But though I am sly, I am a trickster, I am even cruel—I cannot lie.

~ Catherynne M. Valente

Lying is essential to humanity. It plays as large a part perhaps as the quest for pleasure, and is moreover governed by that quest. One lies in order to protect one's pleasure, or one's honour if the disclosure of one's pleasure runs counter to one's honour. One lies all one's life long, even, especially, perhaps only, to those who love one. For they alone make us fear for our pleasure and desire their esteem.

~ Marcel Proust

The pleasure of eating should be an extensive pleasure, not that of the mere gourmet. People who know the garden in which their vegetables have grown and know that the garden is healthy will remember the beauty of the growing plants, perhaps in the dewy first light of morning when gardens are at their best. Such a memory involves itself with the food and is one of the pleasures of eating. (pg. 326, The Pleasures of Eating)

~ Wendell Berry

At first people ate simply because they were alive and because food was tasty. Modern people have come to think that if they do not prepare food with elaborate seasonings, the meal will be tasteless. If you do not try to make food delicious, you will find that nature has made it so.

~ Masanobu Fukuoka

Even connoisseurship can have politics, Slow Food wagers, since an eater in closer touch with his senses will find less pleasure in a box of Chicken McNuggets than in a pastured chicken or a rare breed of pig. It's all very Italian (and decidedly un-American) to insist that doing the right thing is the most pleasurable thing, and that the act of consumption might be an act of addition rather than subtraction.

~ Michael Pollan

Never give up anything your destiny demands while in search of temporary pleasures.

~ Hafiz

Materialistic things bring forth some pleasurable moments, but never a sample of happiness.

~ Hafiz

Where there is happiness, the need for pleasure isn't highly necessary, but where there is pleasure, the gift of happiness is still highly needed. Try not to mistake the two.

~ Hafiz

Many people confuse pleasure with happiness until its temporary blissful feeling comes to an end.

~ Hafiz

A crowd of drunken lovers. Newspaper hats, new couples falling from couches and love- seats—the pleasure remembered, never the regret.

~ Kelli Russell Agodon

Love ceases to be a pleasure when it ceases to be a secret.

~ Aphra Behn

Count your years and you'll be ashamed to be wanting and working for exactly the same things as you wanted when you were a boy. Of this one thing make sure against your dying day - that your faults die before you do. Have done with those unsettled pleasures, which cost one dear - they do one harm after they're past and gone, not merely when they're in prospect. Even when they're over, pleasures of a depraved nature are apt to carry feelings of dissatisfaction, in the same way as a criminal's anxiety doesn't end with the commission of the crime, even if it's undetected at the time. Such pleasures are insubstantial and unreliable; even if they don't do one any harm, they're fleeting in character. Look around for some enduring good instead. And nothing answers this description except what the spirit discovers for itself within itself. A good character is the only guarantee of everlasting, carefree happiness. Even if some obstacle to this comes on the scene, its appearance is only to be compared to that of clouds which drift in front of the sun without ever defeating its light.

~ Seneca

People are attracted more towards bad things because being good has been turned into a boring duty. No adrenaline & dopamine rush, no rewards!

~ Saurabh Sharma

The notion must be put aside that emotions are irrational and we must see emotions for their true function. This will not rob the emotional content, it will merely explain it. Some things when more deeply explained provide greater sources of personal and corporate pleasure, not less.

~ Leviak B. Kelly

A man who loves others based solely on how they make him feel, or what they do for him, is really not loving others at all - but loving only himself.

~ Criss Jami

Another kind of bodily pleasure is that which results from an undisturbed and vigorous constitution of body, when life and active spirits seem to actuate every part. This lively health, when entirely free from all mixture of pain, of itself gives an inward pleasure, independent of all external objects of delight; and though this pleasure does not so powerfully affect us, nor act so strongly on the senses as some of the others, yet it may be esteemed as the greatest of all pleasures; and almost all the Utopians reckon it the foundation and basis of all the other joys of life, since this alone makes the state of life easy and desirable, and when this is wanting, a man is really capable of no other pleasure.

~ Thomas More

I have never done anything in my life except try to make myself ill when I had my health and try to make myself well when I had lost it. I have been equally and thoroughly successful in both, and today in that particular I enjoy perfect health, which I wish I could ruin again; but age prevents me.

~ Giacomo Casanova

This lively health, when entirely free from all mixture of pain, of itself gives an inward pleasure, independent of all external objects of delight; and though this pleasure does not so powerfully affect us, nor act so strongly on the senses as some of the others, yet it may be esteemed as the greatest of all pleasures, and almost all the Utopians reckon it the foundation and basis of all the other joys of life; since this alone makes the state of life easy and desirable; and when this is wanting, a man is really capable of no other pleasure.

~ Thomas More

A pleasurable woman could cause more harm than miserable one.

~ Santosh Kalwar

A good woman is a pleasured treasure.

~ Habeeb Akande

Pleasure is the Root of All Good

~ Susan Block

Sinful and forbidden pleasures are like poisoned bread. They may satisfy appetite for the moment, but there is death in them at the end.

~ Tyron Edwards

It is better to seek purity than the pleasure of sin.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Bertha divined what an enormous wrong had been wrought against the world in that the longing for pleasure is placed in woman just as in man; and that with women that longing is a sin, demanding expiation, if the yearning for pleasure is not at the same time a yearning for motherhood.

~ Arthur Schnitzler

He [Muffat] experienced a sense of pleasure mingled with remorse, the sort of pleasure peculiar to those Catholics whom the fear of hell spurs on to commit sin.

~ Émile Zola

Besides, I don’t understand people who read a book for pleasure and then ruminate on the book’s ideas. Paper was invented so we wouldn’t have to keep all those thoughts in our heads.

~ Pasi Ilmari Jääskeläinen