“All pleasure is a vice, for seeking pleasure is what everybody does in life, and the only dark vice is doing what everybody does.”

— Fernando Pessoa, book The Book of Disquiet

Ibid., p. 265
The Book of Disquiet
Original: Todo o prazer é um vício, porque buscar o prazer é o que todos fazem na vida, e o único vício negro é fazer o que toda a gente faz.

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update Sept. 29, 2023. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "All pleasure is a vice, for seeking pleasure is what everybody does in life, and the only dark vice is doing what every…" by Fernando Pessoa?

Fernando Pessoa288

Portuguese poet, writer, literary critic, translator, publi… 1888–1935

Related quotes

“Religions, which condemn the pleasures of sense, drive men to seek the pleasures of power. Throughout history power has been the vice of the ascetic.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

The New York Herald-Tribune Magazine (6 March 1938)
1930s

“Pleasure of itself is not a vice.”

Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) English writer

April 15, 1778
Life of Samuel Johnson (1791), Vol III

“Pleasure can only be experienced after going through pain and vice versa.”

Mwanandeke Kindembo (1996) Congolese author

“The fallacy of that book is, that Mandeville defines neither vices nor benefits. He reckons among vices everything that gives pleasure. He takes the narrowest system of morality, monastick morality, which holds pleasure itself to be a vice, such as eating salt with our fish, because it makes it taste better; and he reckons wealth as a publick benefit, which is by no means always true. Pleasure of itself is not a vice.”

Bernard Mandeville (1670–1733) Anglo-Dutch writer and physician

Dr. Johnson in conversation, April 15, 1778, reported in James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1791) p. 948.
Criticism

“And what is there else but pleasure, and to what else does beauty move on?”

Hilaire Belloc (1870–1953) writer

Source: The Path to Rome (1902), p. 421

“Once writing has become your major vice and greatest pleasure only death can stop it.”

Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) American author and journalist

Paris Review interview (1958)

“When the brain's pleasure circuits are 'on,' the violence circuits are 'off,' and vice versa.”

James W. Prescott (1930) American psychologist

"Body Pleasure and the Origins of Violence" (1975)
Context: Laboratory experiments show that... When the brain's pleasure circuits are 'on,' the violence circuits are 'off,' and vice versa.