quotations about pleasure
Even though the pursuit of pleasure is part of the American dream--an unassailable right--it is a guilt-ridden hunt.
PALA COPELAND & AL LINK
Soul Sex
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
Pain or pleasure? I say pleasure.
EPICTETUS
Discourses
The contrast is between necessity and pleasure. To satisfy the first is legitimate and, in fact, obligatory; to renounce the second is possible, even meritorious. The problem is that the line of demarcation between necessity and pleasure is very fine and often imperceptible; when one eats or drinks, the two go together, inextricably bound. It is precisely from this observation that a culture of deep suspicion developed in Christian tradition toward the daily gestures of eating and drinking, so innocuous at first glance.
MASSIMO MONTANARI & BETH ARCHER BROMBERT
Medieval Tastes: Food, Cooking, and the Table
When happiness was a matter of pleasure, and pleasure a matter of taste, one could be happy simply by rolling in filth.
DARRIN M. MCMAHON
Happiness: A History
Pleasure is a crumbling statue.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
Pleasure is labour too, and tires as much.
WILLIAM COWPER
Hope
Pleasure is life, and pain is death.
MINOT JUDSON SAVAGE
Light on the Cloud
Oh my meters running so I got to go now
It's the pleasure principle oh oh ohh
It's the principle of pleasure, ohh
It's the pleasure principle oh oh
JANET JACKSON
"The Pleasure Principle"
We are prone to seek immediate pleasure or good, however small, rather than remote pleasure or good, however vast.
HORACE MANN
Thoughts
Past pleasures are of as little comfort to a man as the money in his neighbor's pocket.
ABRAHAM MILLER
Unmoral Maxims
Pleasure is Nature's test, her sign of approval. When man is happy, he is in harmony with himself and his environment.
OSCAR WILDE
The Soul of Man Under Socialism
Pleasure is not shameful, not even neutral; it is sacred. The act of consciously receiving pleasure connects our awareness to the very pulse of life through the senses, and in doing so, honors the divine.
JENA LA FLAMME
Pleasurable Weight Loss
Pleasure is nought but virtue's gayer name--
I wrong her still, I rate her worth too low:
Virtue the root, and pleasure is the flow'r.
EDWARD YOUNG
The Complaint
Pleasure is the flower that fades.
STANISLAS JEAN DE MARQUIS BOUFFLERS
attributed, Chicken Soup for the Grandma's Soul
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
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
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
Ever let the Fancy roam,
Pleasure never is at home.
JOHN KEATS
"Fancy"
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"