Pleasure Quotes

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The more a thing is perfect, the more if feels pleasure and pain.

Dante Alighieri

Certainly we ought to be discontented, we ought not simply to find out ways of making the best of a bad job, and yet if we kill all pleasure in the actual process of life, what sort of future are we preparing for ourselves? If a man cannot enjoy the return of spring, why should he be happy in a labour-saving Utopia? What will he do with the leisure that the machine will give him?

Dwell I but in the suburbs Of your good pleasure?

William Shakespeare

We are so constituted that we can gain intense pleasure only from the contrast, and only very little from the condition itself.

Having acknowledged the measure of the good to be pleasure, i. e., beauty, the European upper classes went back in their comprehension of art to the gross conception of the primitive Greeks which Plato had already condemned. And with this understanding of life, a theory of art was formulated.

All the opinions in the world point out that pleasure is our aim.

Michel de Montaigne

There are not a few among the disciples of charity who require, in their vocation, scarcely less excitement than the votaries of pleasure in theirs.

Charles Dickens

I think the world is like a great mirror, and reflects our lives just as we ourselves look upon it. Those who turn sad faces toward the world find only sadness reflected. But a smile is reflected in the same way, and cheers and brightens our hearts. You think there is no pleasure to be had in life. That is because you are heartsick and — and tired, as you say. With one sad story ended you are afraid to begin another — a sequel — feeling it would be equally sad. But why should it be? Isn't the joy or sorrow equally divided in life?

Pleasure is the only thing one should live for, nothing ages like happiness.

Every excess causes a defect; every defect an excess. Every sweet hath its sour; every evil its good. Every faculty which is a receiver of pleasure has an equal penalty put on its abuse. It is to answer for its moderation with its life. For every grain of wit there is a grain of folly. For every thing you have missed, you have gained something else; and for every thing you gain, you lose something. If riches increase, they are increased that use them. If the gatherer gathers too much, nature takes out of the man what she puts into his chest; swells the estate, but kills the owner. Nature hates monopolies and exceptions.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

When Pleasure is at the bar the jury is not impartial.

There is pleasure in meeting the eyes of those to whom we have done good.

Jean de La Bruyère

Nothing brings more pain than too much pleasure; nothing more bondage than too much liberty.

Benjamin Franklin

These studies are a spur to the young, a delight to the old; an ornament in prosperity, a consoling refuge in adversity; they are pleasure for us at home, and no burden abroad; they stay up with us at night, they accompany us when we travel, they are with us in our country visits.

In educating the young we use pleasure and pain as rudders to steer their course.

So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the Earth, and to take pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information.

Most people measure their happiness in terms of physical pleasure and material possession. Could they win some visible goal which they have set on the horizon, how happy they would be! Lacking this gift or that circumstance, they would be miserable. If happiness is to be so measured, I who cannot hear or see have every reason to sit in a corner with folded hands and weep. If I am happy in spite of my deprivations, if my happiness is so deep that it is a faith, so thoughtful that it becomes a philosophy of life, — if, in short, I am an optimist, my testimony to the creed of optimism is worth hearing.

In pain there is as much wisdom as in pleasure: like the latter it is one of the best self preservatives of a species.

Friedrich Nietzsche

We become aware, however, that all customs, even the hardest, grow pleasanter and milder with time, and that the severest way of life may become a habit and therefore a pleasure.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Work is often the father of pleasure; I pity the man overwhelmed with the weight of his own leisure.

To lift and penetrate and tear apart the soil is a labour — a pleasure — always accompanied by an exultation that no unprofitable exercise can ever provide.

The performance of duty, and not an indulgence in vapid ease and vapid pleasure, is all that makes life worth while.

Theodore Roosevelt

It has been said that beauty is a promise of happiness. Conversely, the possibility of pleasure can be a beginning of beauty.

The future, good or ill, was not forgotten, but ceased to have any power over the present. Health and hope grew strong in them, and they were content with each good day as it came, taking pleasure in every meal, and in every word and song.

J. R. R. Tolkien

And are not the temperate exactly in the same case? They are temperate because they are intemperate—which may seem to be a contradiction, but is nevertheless the sort of thing which happens with this foolish temperance. For there are pleasures which they must have, and are afraid of losing; and therefore they abstain from one class of pleasures because they are overcome by another: and whereas intemperance is defined as "being under the domination of pleasure," they overcome only because they are overcome by pleasure.