quotations about pleasure
True pleasures are paid for in advance; false pleasures afterwards, with heavy and compound interest.
JOHN LUBBOCK
Peace and Happiness
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
Pleasure is the business of the young, business the pleasure of the old.
FULKE GREVILLE
Maxims, Characters and Reflections
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 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
The Puritans thought they could simply repress man's sexual nature, and they reaped a whirlwind as a result. Their code of sexual morality -- which became America's -- was nothing more than a set of rules laid down by people who believed that all pleasure was suspect.
HUGH HEFNER
Playboy, January 1974
Yet, sluggard, wake, and gull thy soul no more
With earth's false pleasures, and the world's delight,
Whose fruit is fair and pleasing to the sight,
But sour in taste, false as the putrid core:
Thy flaring glass is gems at her half light;
She makes thee seeming rich, but truly poor:
She boasts a kernel, and bestows a shell;
Performs an inch of her fair-promis'd ell:
Her words protest a heav'n; her works produce a hell.
FRANCIS QUARLES
Emblems
The highest pleasure is only consciousness of freedom from the deepest pain.
JAMES PARTON
Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin
Everywhere there is pleasure you will find a woman in disguise.
JEAN BAUDRILLARD
Cool Memories
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
The fact that all animals and men pursue pleasure is some indication that it is in some way the highest good.
ARISTOTLE
Nicomachean Ethics