Pleasure Quotes - Page 27

• Whatever professes to benefit by pleasing must please at once. The pleasures of the mind imply something sudden and unexpected; that which elevates must always surprise.

  Samuel Johnson

  Style, Mind, Benefits

  Samuel Johnson (1977). “Selected Poetry and Prose”, p.380, Univ of California Press

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• In war, hunting, and love, men for one pleasure a thousand griefes prove.

  George Herbert

  War, Men, Hunting

  George Herbert (1874). “The Complete Works of George Herbert: Prose”, p.326

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• Sense of pleasure we may well
  Spare out of life perhaps, and not repine,
  But live content, which is the calmest life;
  But pain is perfect misery, the worst
  Of evils, and excessive, overturns
  All patience.

  John Milton

  Pain, Evil, Perfect

  John Milton, Elijah Fenton, Samuel Johnson (1821). “Paradise lost”, p.182

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• There are two kinds of happiness - the temporary pleasure derived primarily from material comfort alone and another more enduring comfort that results from the thorough transformation and development of the mind. We can see in our own lives that the latter form of happiness is superior because when our mental state is calm and happy, we can easily put up with minor pains and physical discomforts. On the other hand, when our mind is restless and upset, the most comfortable physical facilities do not make us happy.

  Dalai Lama

  Pain, Hands, Two

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• There is a guilty pleasure in being rude and knowing that it's acting rather than you. But you get the same release as if you were being rude in life.

  Laurence Fox

  Knowing, Rude, Acting

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• God has laid upon us many severe trials in this world, but He has created labour for us, and all is compensated. Thanks to labour, the bitterest tears are dried; a serious consoler, it always promises less than it bestows; a pleasure unparalleled, it is still the salt of other pleasures. Everything abandons you -- gaiety, wit, love -- labour alone is always present.

  Ernest Legouve

  Promise, Tears, Serious

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• On the whole, lying is a cheerful affair. Embellishments are intended to give pleasure. People long to tell you what they imagine you want to hear. They want to amuse you; they want to amuse themselves; they want to show you a good time. This is beyond hospitality. This is art.

  Isabel Fonseca

  Art, Lying, Long

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• Custom, which diminishes the intense, increases the moderate, pleasures.

  Andrew Michael Ramsay

  Intense, Increase, Diminish

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• Were all the pleasures in the world, even pure air, made solely for the rich? I think it is immoral - it is horrible! - that one man may own twenty millions of money, and another has to commit a crime to keep the life in his miserable body. And if I were wealthy, I'd be a spendthrift! It's the spendthrifts who are the real friends of the poor. Some of their money filters through to the very lowest classes.

  Ellen Buckingham Mathews

  Real, Men, Thinking

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• People will invite you and seek you constantly if you learn how to give them the extreme pleasure of being clever. People adore the one who encourages them to display their conversational wares and admires the display.

  Margery Wilson

  Clever, People, Giving

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• I've always been an escapist, I guess, and I spend so much time on the internet absorbing ideas and processing the horrors of the world that when I'm actually going to read for pleasure, it's always something ridiculous about a dragon. I'm so saturated with the injustice and torment of the real world that it's really hard for me to get myself to read anything that's even set in our universe, because I'm exhausted by our universe.

  Lindy West

  Real, World, Ridiculous

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• I'm not sure which I dislike more: 'Ulysses' or the James Joyce estate. Admittedly, a few people have got some pleasure from 'Ulysses', but against that, you have to weigh the millions of lives that have been ruined by the futile attempts to read it.

  Kevin Myers

  Book, People, Language

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• It's always a pleasure to see John. I'm fond of telling people that when I was a young actor in NY and had no work ,no money, you know the story because you're heard it before.

  Harvey Keitel

  People, Actors, Stories

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• In the first place, it is obvious that not only is wealth concentrated in our times but an immense power and despotic economic dictatorship is consolidated in the hands of a few, who often are not owners but only the trustees and managing directors of invested funds which they administer according to their own arbitrary will and pleasure. This dictatorship is being most forcibly exercised by those who, since they hold the money and completely control it, control credit also and rule the lending of money.

  Pope Pius XI

  Hands, Credit, Politics

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• It is the assumption of this book that there is a typical human nature. It is the aim of this book to seek it. Just like a surgeon, a psychiatrist can make all sorts of basic assumptions when a patient lies down upon the couch. He can assume that the patient knows what it means to love, to envy, to trust, to think, to speak, to fear, to smile, to bargain, to covet, to dream, to remember, to sing, to quarrel, to lie. The 'smile' of a baboon is a threat; the smile of a man is a sign of pleasure: it is human nature, the world over.

  Matt Ridley

  Dream, Lying, Book

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• One of life's most over-valued pleasures is sexual intercourse; of one of life's least appreciated pleasures in defecation.

  Mark Twain

  Love, Appreciated, Intercourse

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• Through inculcating the notion that sacrifice is a virtue, Christianity has succeeded in convincing many people that misery incurred through sacrifice is a mark of virtue. Pain becomes the inignia of morality - and conversely, pleasure becomes the insignia of immorality. Christianity, therefore, does not say, "Go forth and be miserable." Rather, it says, "Go forth and practice the virtue of self-sacrifice." In practical terms, these commands are identical.

  George H. Smith

  Pain, Sacrifice, Practice

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• Sexual intercourse is a grossly overrated pastime; the position is undignified, the pleasure momentary and the consequences damnable.

  Lord Chesterfield

  Funny, Pastime, Overrated

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• It was always a pleasure to write. I can never think of a time when I just hacked something out to fulfil a contract or meet a deadline. I might have hacked things out, but it was always stuff I loved.

  Stephen King

  Writing, Thinking, Might

  "Part two of the full Stephen King interview". Interview with Tim Adams, www.theguardian.com. September 14, 2000.

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• I once heard that Quentin Tarantino, who I obviously love and think is a genius, says that there's no such thing as guilty pleasure, there's only pleasures. And I do love that idea, because I do think that there's a pretentiousness when people make a list of their favorite things. I like to live a life where I don't think of my pleasures as guilty pleasures.

  Mindy Kaling

  Thinking, Ideas, People

  Interview with Genevieve Koski, www.avclub.com. November 16, 2011.

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• The learned understand the reason of art; the unlearned feel the pleasure.

  Quintilian

  Art, Reason, Feels

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• It doesn't take a lot to make me happy. I take pleasure from everything I do.

  Oprah Winfrey

  Make Me Happy

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• The children's lessons should provide material for their mental growth, should exercise the several powers of their minds, should furnish them with fruitful ideas, and should afford them knowledge, really valuable for its own sake, accurate, and interesting, of the kind that the child may recall as a man with profit and pleasure.

  Charlotte Mason

  Children, Exercise, Men

  Charlotte Mason (2013). “The Original Home School Series”, p.130, Simon and Schuster

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• The immersive stories of This Is Paradise are a lithe blend of formal invention and traditional narrative pleasures. As such they reflect Kristiana Kahakauwila's intimate but expansive vision of a Hawai'i forged from the collisions of past and present, here and there. Her protagonists are as richly distinctive as the pidgin they speak, and yet each struggles profoundly with identity-that negotiation between ourselves and the world, which is at once Hawaiian, American, universally and compellingly human.

  Peter Ho Davies

  Struggle, Past, Vision

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• Surely if living creatures saw the results of all their evil deeds, they would turn away from them in disgust. But selfhood blinds them, and they cling to their obnoxious desires. They crave pleasure for themselves and they cause pain to others; when death destroys their individuality, they find no peace; their thirst for existence abides and their selfhood reappears in new births. Thus they continue to move in the coil and can find no escape from the hell of their own making.

  Gautama Buddha

  Karma, Pain, Moving

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