Hedonism Quotes

• Retirement requires the invention of a new hedonism, not a return to the hedonism of youth

  Mason Cooley

  Retirement, Return, Youth

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• We have had enough, once and for all, of Hedonism--the gloomy philosophy which says that Pleasure is the only good.

  C. S. Lewis

  Philosophy, Had Enough, Pleasure

  C. S. Lewis (1987). “Present Concerns”, p.54, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Hedonism can be a rational response to a difficult life.

  Phillip Lopate

  Difficult, Rational, Response

  Source: www.psychologytoday.com

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• You'll live to be a hundred if you give up all the things that make you want to.

  Woody Allen

  Funny, Birthday, Witty

  "Fictional character: Pearl". "Interiors", www.imdb.com. 1978.

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• I'm a big believer that you can try to change the world based on philosophy, doctrine, and belief. But I think the thing that really drives the world is hedonism, the pleasure factor.

  Daniel Meyer

  Philosophy, Thinking, Trying

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• The struggle which is not joyous is the wrong struggle. The joy of the struggle is not hedonism and hilarity, but the sense of purpose, achievement and dignity.

  Germaine Greer

  Struggle, Joy, Achievement

  Germaine Greer (2009). “The Female Eunuch”, p.19, Harper Collins

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• Punctuality is the thief of time

  Oscar Wilde

  Time, Work, Lying

  Oscar Wilde (2007). “Epigrams of Oscar Wilde”, p.222, Wordsworth Editions

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• The desert is a spiritual place, we vaguely understand, and the sea the mere playground of our hedonism.

  Tim Winton

  Spiritual, Nature, Sea

  Tim Winton (2012). “Land's Edge: A Coastal Memoir”, p.18, Pan Macmillan

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• Name me, if you can, a better feeling than the one you get when you've half a bottle of Chivas in the bag with a gram of coke up your nose and a teenage lovely pulling off her tube top in the next seat over while you're doing a hundred miles an hour in a suburban side street.

  P. J. O'Rourke

  Teenage, Names, Feelings

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• The philosophy of hedonism means little to lovers of pleasure. They have no inclination to read philosophy, or to write it.

  Mason Cooley

  Philosophy, Writing, Mean

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• When consequentialist theories are developed in terms of an equally shallow psychology of the good - such as a crude form of hedonism - the results can sometimes strike sensible people as revolting and inhuman. People can be reduced to simple repositories of positive or negative sensory states, and their humanity is lost sight of entirely.

  Allen W. Wood

  Simple, Sight, People

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Many humanists have argued that happiness involves a combination of hedonism and creative moral development; that an exuberant life fuses excellence and enjoyment, meaning and enrichment, emotion and cognition.

  Paul Kurtz

  Moral Development, Creative, Excellence

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• Unrestrained automobility, hedonism, individualism, and conspicuous consumption cannot be sustained because they take more than they give back. A spiritually impoverished world cannot be sustained because meaninglessness, anomie, and despair will corrode the desire to be sustained and the belief that humanity is worth sustaining. But these are the very things that distinguish the modern age from its predecessors, Genuine sustainability, in other words, will come not from superficial changes but from a deeper process akin to humankind growing up to a fuller stature.

  David W. Orr

  Growing Up, Giving, Humanity

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• You can't build marriage on a foundation of selfish hedonism, because that would be to promise people only roses, and marriage is also thorns.

  Alan Keyes

  Selfish, People, Rose

  Alan Keyes' Speech at the DuPage County Republican Central Committee's Party for the President, www.keyesarchives.com. September 2, 2004.

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• Never before has the seductive market way of life held such sway in nearly every sphere of American life. This marketing way of life promotes addictions to stimulation and obsessions with comfort and convenience ... centered primarily around bodily pleasures and status rankings. ... The common denominator is a rugged and ragged individualism and rapacious hedonism in quest of a perennial "high" in body and mind.

  Cornel West

  Addiction, Seductive, Black History

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• While the Western society gives total freedom to the individuals to do whatever "consenting adults" please, which admittedly is better than having the government poke into your private life and your bedroom, like in Islamic countries, there are no moral compasses to tell what is right from wrong. The very notion of right and wrong has come under question. The motto is "if it feels good do it". Hedonism rules!

  Ali Sina

  Country, Islamic, Government

  Source: myislam.dk

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• My rule of life prescribed as an absolutely sacred rite smoking cigars and also the drinking of alcohol before, after and if need be during all meals and in the intervals between them.

  Winston Churchill

  Drinking, Beer, Funny Sarcastic

  Uttered during a lunch with the Arab leader, Ibn Saud

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• Traditional hedonism...was based on the direct experience of pleasure: wine, women and song; sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll; or whatever the local variant. The problem, from a capitalist perspective, is that there are inherent limits to all this. People become sated, bored...Modern self-illusory hedonism solves this dilemma because here, what one is really consuming are fantasies and day-dreams about what having a certain product would be like.

  David Graeber

  Dream, Song, Sex

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• When I was a student I was very, very ambitious, completely immersed in my comedy career. I never had that period of reckless hedonism that you should get out of your system in your youth.

  Steve Coogan

  Careers, Ambitious, Comedy

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• An artist might be attracted to hedonism, but of course an artist is not a hedonist. He's a worker, always.

  David Hockney

  Artist, Might, Workers

  BBC John Tusa Interview, www.americansuburbx.com. 2004.

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• I think self-destructiveness is given a really bad rap. I think it can also mean self-reflection and poetic sensiblity. It can mean empathy, hedonism, a libertarianism.

  Courtney Love

  Rap, Mean, Thinking

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• I decided that life rationally considered seemed pointless and futile, but it is still interesting in a variety of ways, including the study of science. So why not carry on, following the path of scientific hedonism? Besides, I did not have the courage for the more rational procedure of suicide.

  Robert S. Mulliken

  Suicide, Science, Interesting

  Robert S. Mulliken (2012). “Life of a Scientist: An Autobiographical Account of the Development of Molecular Orbital Theory”, p.24, Springer Science & Business Media

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• Selfish hedonism is not a pejorative. It is a description - an exactly accurate description of what is involved in homosexual relations.

  Alan Keyes

  Selfish, Description, Relation

  Alan Keyes' Speech at the DuPage County Republican Central Committee's Party for the President, www.keyesarchives.com. September 2, 2004.

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• God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in Him.

  John Piper

  God, Christian, Religious

  John Piper (2005). “For Your Joy”

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• By consequence I hold that no one ever did, or can do, anything for "society."... Comte invented the term altruism as an antonym for egoism, and it found its way at once into everyone's mouth, although it is utterly devoid of meaning, since it points to nothing that ever existed in mankind; This hybrid or rather this degenerate form of hedonism served powerfully to invest collectivism's principles with a specious moral sanction, and collectivists naturally made the most of it.

  Albert J. Nock

  Principles, Mouths, Way

  "Memoirs of a Superfluous Man" by Albert J. Nock, (p. 305), 1943.

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