Pleasure Quotes

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With health, everything is a source of pleasure; without it, nothing else, whatever it may be, is enjoyable...Healt h is by far the most important element in human happiness.

Arthur Schopenhauer

A school may be regarded as a single individual who talks to himself for a hundred years, and takes an extraordinary pleasure in his own being, however, foolish and silly it may be.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The pleasure in planned construction is one of the most powerful motives in men who combine intelligence with energy; whatever can be constructed according to a plan, such men will endeavor to construct.

Bertrand Russell

I have depended on books not only for pleasure and for the wisdom they bring to all who read, but also for that knowledge which comes to others through their eyes and their ears.

Skilled work, of no matter what kind, is only done well by those who take a certain pleasure in it, quite apart from its utility, either to themselves in earning a living, or to the world through its outcome.

Bertrand Russell

The sincere love of books has nothing to do with cleverness or stupidity any more than any other sincere love. It is a quality of character, a freshness, a power of pleasure, a power of faith. A silly person may delight in reading masterpieces just as a silly person may delight in picking flowers. A fool may be in love with a poet as he may be in love with a woman.

G. K. Chesterton

That a man can take pleasure in marching in formation to the strains of a band is enough to make me despise him. He has only been given his big brain by mistake; a backbone was all he needed.

Albert Einstein

I am excessively slothful, and wonderfully industrious-by fits. There are epochs when any kind of mental exercise is torture, and when nothing yields me pleasure but the solitary communion with the 'mountains & the woods'-the 'altars' of Byron. I have thus rambled and dreamed away whole months, and awake, at last, to a sort of mania for composition. Then I scribble all day, and read all night, so long as the disease endures.

Edgar Allan Poe

Such is the pleasure of projecting that many content themselves with a succession of visionary schemes, and wear out their allotted time in the calm amusement of contriving what they never attempt or hope to execute.

Lastly, I would address one general admonition to all: that they consider what are the true ends of knowledge, and that they seek it not either for pleasure of the mind, or for contention, or for superiority to others, or for profit, or fame, or power, or any of these inferior things: but for the benefit and use of life; and that they perfect and govern it in charity.

Pleasure causes us to do base actions and pain causes us to abstain from doing noble actions.

Pleasure and revenge
Have ears more deaf than adders to the voice
Of any true decision.

William Shakespeare

What consoles one nowadays is not repentance but pleasure. Repentance is quite out of date.

Where there is a mind, there are feelings such as pain, pleasure, and joy. No sentient being wants pain: all wants happiness instead.

Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama

The facts which have caused us to believe in the dominance of the pleasure principle in mental life also find expression in the hypothesis that the mental apparatus endeavours to keep the quantity of excitation present in it as low as possible or at least to keep it constant.

If I had a humble spirit in my service who, when I asked for a glass of water, brought me the world's costliest wines blended in a chalice, I should dismiss him, in order to teach him that my pleasure consists, not in what I enjoy, but in having my own way.

Søren Kierkegaard

If you practice in accord with your individual capacity, little by little you will find more pleasure and joy in it. As you gain inner strength, your positive actions will gain in profundity and scope.

Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama

Works of imagination excel by their allurement and delight; by their power of attracting and detaining the attention. That book is good in vain which the reader throws away. He only is the master who keeps the mind in pleasing captivity; whose pages are perused with eagerness, and in hope of new pleasure are perused again; and whose conclusion is perceived with an eye of sorrow, such as the traveller casts upon departing day.

Happiness that depends mainly on physical pleasure is unstable; one day it's there, the next day it may not be.

Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama

The height and value of true virtue consists in the facility, utility, and pleasure of its exercise; so far from difficulty, that boys, as well as men, and the innocent as well as the subtle, may make it their own; and it is by order and good conduct, and not by force, that it is to be acquired.

Michel de Montaigne

Art is not a pleasure, a solace, or an amusement; art is a great matter. Art is an organ of human life, transmitting man's reasonable perception into feeling.

Reason is applied to what is developing, practical understanding to what is developed. The former does not ask, What is the Purpose? and the latter does not ask, What is the source? Reason takes pleasure in development; practical understanding tries to hold things fast so that it can use them.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

It was a pleasure and a privilege to walk with him [H.D. Thoreau]. He knew the country like a fox or a bird, and passed through it as freely by paths of his own.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Nobody but a person fond of Natural History can imagine the pleasure of strolling under cocoa-nuts in a thicket of bananas and coffee-plants, and an endless number of wildflowers.

You remember my ideal cat has always a huge rat in its mouth, just going out of sight - though going out of sight in itself has a peculiar pleasure.

Emily Dickinson