Pleasure Quotes

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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.

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

When we have read a book or poem so often that we can no longer find any amusement in reading it by ourselves, we can still take pleasure in reading it to a companion. To him it has all the graces of novelty.

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

Even when we are quite alone, how often do we think with pleasure or pain of what others think of us - of their imagined approbation or disapprobation.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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 Repentance is quite out of date.

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

William Shakespeare

Men of sound sense have Law for their god, but men without sense Pleasure.

There are people who have an appetite for grief; pleasure is not strong enough and they crave pain. They have mithridatic stomachs which must be fed on poisoned bread, natures so doomed that no prosperity can sooth their ragged and dishevelled desolation.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Some glory in their birth, some in their skill, Some in their wealth, some in their bodies' force, Some in their garments, though new-fangled ill; Some in their hawks and hounds, some in their horse ; And every humor hath his adjunct pleasure, Wherein it finds a joy above the rest.

William Shakespeare

The very austerity of the Brahmans is tempting to the devotional soul, as a more refined and nobler luxury. Wants so easily and gracefully satisfied seem like a more refined pleasure. Their conception of creation is peaceful as a dream.

Henry David Thoreau

You despise books; you whose lives are absorbed in the vanities of ambition, the pursuit of pleasure or indolence; but remember that all the known world, excepting only savage nations, is governed by books.

It is a great pleasure to escape sometimes from the restless class of Reformers. What if these grievances exist? So do you and I.

Henry David Thoreau

The most beautiful colors laid on at random, give less pleasure than a black-and-white drawing.

There is more real pleasure to be gotten out of a malicious act, where your heart is in it, than out of thirty acts of a nobler sort.

How little is required for pleasure! The sound of a bagpipe - without music, life would be an error.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Adventurous men enjoy shipwrecks, mutinies, earthquakes, conflagrations, and all kinds of unpleasant experiences. They say to themselves, for example, 'So this is what an earthquake is like,' and it gives them pleasure to have their knowledge of the world increased by this new item.

Bertrand Russell

There is no action of man in this life that is not the beginning of so long a chain of consequences as no human providence is high enough to give a man a prospect in the end. And in this chain, there are linked together both pleasing and unpleasing events in such manner as he that will do anything for his pleasure must engage himself to suffer all the pains annexed to it.