“By feeling the sunshine, or pleasure, we end up forgetting all of our miseries, or pains in life.”

“Is there life before death? That's chalked up
In Ballymurphy. Competence with pain,
Coherent miseries, a bite and a sup,
We hug our little destiny again.”

“The inextricable way pleasure and pain are mixed up with each other in this world is a mournful fact to beings who are all the time striving for pleasure alone. In the ideal world there is no pain, no misery. There is nothing but happiness. But in our world pain seems to have been the original feeling, the first one to appear in the evolution of sentiency. Pleasure is a sort of after-thought, a secondary attribute of consciousness which developed later as an aid to pain in keeping living beings straight. Pain is a whip, a penalty. Pleasure is a reward or bribe. Pain is a curse. We are all the time trying to minimize and escape it. In an ideal world the inhabitants never have any impulses that drive them to improper acts. All their impulses are good. Every act is proper and right. Ideal beings need only to live and act in order to be happy. We are not ideal beings. Our world happens to be one affording almost unlimited opportunities for improvement.”

“The only justifiable stopping place for for the expansion of altruism is the point at which all whose welfare can be affected by our actions are included within the circle of altruism. This means that all beings with the capacity to feel pleasure or pain should be included; we can improve their welfare by increasing their pleasures and diminishing their pains.”

“If we would regain our freedom, we must shake off the burden of sensation, no longer react to the world by our senses, break our bonds. For all sensation is a bond, pleasure as much as pain, joy as much as misery. The only free mind is the one that, pure of all intimacy with beings or objects, plies its own vacuity.”

“There are never words for the strongest of our feelings. There is just the pain that we cannot share. Pain we must all feel alone.”

“How mutable are our feelings, and how strange is that clinging love we have of life even in the excess of misery!”

“The end of life is not to be happy, nor to achieve pleasure and avoid pain, but to do the will of God, come what may.”

“all our suffering is associated with this pre-occupation. All loss and gain, pleasure and pain arise because we identify so closely with this vague feeling of selfness that we have. We are so emotionally involved with and attached to this "self" that we take it for granted.”

“… when we say we're looking for a spiritual adviser, we're really looking for someone to tell us what to do with our bodies. Decisions of the flesh. We forget to learn from pleasure as well as pain.”