quotations about pleasure
Pleasure believes in friends, pleasure creates communities, pleasure crumbles faces into smiles, pleasure links hand in hand, pleasure restores, pain is the most selfish thing.
DELMORE SCHWARTZ
"Pleasure", Selected Poems (1938-1958): Summer Knowledge
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"
So what do we know about the pursuit of pleasure compared to the pursuit of meaningful activities that also foster engagement, relationships, meaning, and accomplishment? Can the seeking of pleasure alone lead to psychological well-being? Research shows that engagement and meaning are significantly related to well-being, whereas pleasure is negatively related to objective well-being, including things like education, achievement, and the absence of mental disorders. Engagement and meaning contribute more to well-being than pleasure, because they help people build resources that are valuable. Seeking pleasure provides a short-term reward but does not provide further skill or resource development.
JENNIFER W. SHEWMAKER
Sexualized Media Messages and Our Children
Passive pleasure is no pleasure at all.
ARTHUR ADAMOV
Ping Pong
The search for pleasure is circular, repetitive, atemporal. The variety seeking of the spectator, the thrill hunter, the sexually promiscuous, always ends in the same place. It has an end. It comes to the end and has to start over. It is not a journey and return, but a closed cycle, a locked room, a cell.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Dispossessed
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
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
The progression of pleasures is from the distich to the quatrain, from the quatrain to the sonnet, from the sonnet to the ballad, from the ballad to the ode, from the ode to the cantata, from the cantata to the dithyramb. The husband who commences with dithyramb is a fool.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
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
The pleasure of any incident, whether it is of a sunset, or sexual, or any sensory pleasure, is recorded and thought over. So thought as pleasure plays a tremendous part in our life. Something happened yesterday which was a most lovely thing, a most happy event, it is recorded; thought comes upon it, chews it and keeps on thinking about it and wants it repeated tomorrow, whether it be sexual or otherwise. So thought gives vitality to an incident that is over.
JIDDU KRISHNAMURTI
The Awakening of Intelligence
All pleasures sicken, and all glories sink:
Each has his share; and who would more obtain,
Shall find the pleasure pays not half the pain.
ALEXANDER POPE
Essay on Man
The choicest pleasures of life lie within the ring of moderation.
MARTIN FARQUHAR TUPPER
Proverbial Philosophy
We are so constituted that we can gain intense pleasure only from the contrast, and only very little from the condition itself.
SIGMUND FREUD
Civilization and Its Discontents
The poor have very few hours in which to enjoy themselves; they must take their pleasure raw; they haven't the time to cook it.
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
Where There Is Nothing
The more we go in the direction of Essence and away from the ego, the more pleasure we experience, because pleasure is largely dependent on how present we are to whatever we are doing. Anything can be pleasurable if we are present to it without the interference of the egoic mind. The simplest things are pleasurable when we are present to them, even things we generally don't like. Being present is one of the secrets to happiness. The more we drop out of our egoic mind and into our senses, the more pleasure our senses deliver. Pleasure actually points the way Home.
GINA LAKE
What About Now?
He who takes his fill of every pleasure ... becomes depraved; while he who avoids all pleasures alike ... becomes insensible.
ARISTOTLE
Nicomachean Ethics
Pleasure is the flower that fades, remembrance is the lasting perfume.
BRUCE LEE
Jeet Kune Do: Bruce Lee's Commentaries on the Martial Way
Pleasure is a hedonistic reflex, a burning impulse to abandon rational thought altogether and immerse oneself in the moment.
GENE WALLENSTEIN
The Pleasure Instinct
Pleasure is a river running to the sea; happiness is the full, calm sea.
PETER KREEFT
Heaven: The Heart's Deepest Longing
Many know how to please, but know not when they have ceased to give pleasure.
ARTHUR HELPS
Thoughts in the Cloister and the Crowd