quotations about pleasure
Pleasure is life, and pain is death.
MINOT JUDSON SAVAGE
Light on the Cloud
Everybody's looking for a reason to live
If you're looking for a reason
I've a reason to give
Pleasure, little treasure
DEPECHE MODE
"Pleasure, Little Treasure"
The culture industry perpetually cheats its consumers of what it perpetually promises. The promissory note which, with its plots and staging, it draws on pleasure is endlessly prolonged; the promise, which is actually all the spectacle consists of, is illusory: all it actually confirms is that the real point will never be reached, that the diner must be satisfied with the menu.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
Dialectic of Enlightenment
For the rational, psychologically healthy man, the desire for pleasure is the desire to celebrate his control over reality. For the neurotic, the desire for pleasure is the desire to escape from reality.
AYN RAND
The Virtue of Selfishness
We are prone to seek immediate pleasure or good, however small, rather than remote pleasure or good, however vast.
HORACE MANN
Thoughts
Pleasure is the flower that fades.
STANISLAS JEAN DE MARQUIS BOUFFLERS
attributed, Chicken Soup for the Grandma's Soul
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 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 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 a crumbling statue.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
Pleasure cannot be shared; like Pain, it can only be experienced or inflicted, and when we give Pleasure to our Lovers or bestow Charity upon the Needy, we do so, not to gratify the object of our Benevolence, but only ourselves. For the Truth is that we are kind for the same reason as we are cruel, in order that we may enhance the sense of our own Power.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
After Many a Summer Dies the Swan
Pleasure is labour too, and tires as much.
WILLIAM COWPER
Hope
Do you, like a skilful weigher, put into the balance the pleasures and the pains, near and distant, and weigh them, and then say which outweighs the other? If you weigh pleasures against pleasures, you of course take the more and greater; or if you weigh pains against pains, then you choose that course of action in which the painful is exceeded by the pleasant, whether the distant by the near or the near by the distant; and you avoid that course of action in which the pleasant is exceeded by the painful.
PLATO
Protagoras
Your partner's pleasure is your pleasure.
JUDY FORD & RACHEL GREENE BALDINO
The Complete Idiot's Guide to Enhancing Sexual Desire
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
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"
Pleasure is the business of the young, business the pleasure of the old.
FULKE GREVILLE
Maxims, Characters and Reflections
Pain or pleasure? I say pleasure.
EPICTETUS
Discourses
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 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