"Definitions of Poetry" (1811).
Context: Poetry is not the proper antithesis to prose, but to science. Poetry is opposed to science, and prose to metre. The proper and immediate object of science is the acquirement, or communication, of truth; the proper and immediate object of poetry is the communication of immediate pleasure.
“The question was, whether, if the reformers of society and government could succeed in their objects, and every person in the community were free and in a state of physical comfort, the pleasures of life, being no longer kept up by struggle and privation, would cease to be pleasures.”
Source: Autobiography (1873), Ch. 5: A Crisis in My Mental History (p. 102)
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John Stuart Mill 179
British philosopher and political economist 1806–1873Related quotes
1860s, Speeches to Ohio Regiments (1864), Speech to the One Hundred Sixty-fourth Ohio Regiment
“When pleasure is made a business, it ceases to be pleasure.”
Source: Aphorisms and Reflections (1901), p. 115
Autobiography (1873)
Context: Scott does this still better than Wordsworth, and a very second-rate landscape does it more effectually than any poet. What made Wordsworth's poems a medicine for my state of mind, was that they expressed, not mere outward beauty, but states of feeling, and of thought coloured by feeling, under the excitement of beauty. They seemed to be the very culture of the feelings, which I was in quest of. In them I seemed to draw from a Source of inward joy, of sympathetic and imaginative pleasure, which could be shared in by all human beings; which had no connexion with struggle or imperfection, but would be made richer by every improvement in the physical or social condition of mankind. From them I seemed to learn what would be the perennial sources of happiness, when all the greater evils of life shall have been removed. And I felt myself at once better and happier as I came under their influence.
“His Rhetoric, Our Reality,” http://www.antiwar.com/mercer/?articleid=4585 Antiwar.com, January 26, 2005.
2000s, 2005
On the Role of Leadership in the West vs Role of Leadership in Shi'ism (date of speech unknown). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0evSkdzXF_4
Speeches: On Religious Government and Islamic Leadership
Homily during the Holy Mass at the Capital Mall in Washington, D.C., on 7 October 1979, during the pope's first apostolic journey to the United States
Source: Libreria Editrice Vaticana http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/homilies/1979/documents/hf_jp-ii_hom_19791007_usa-washington_en.html
“Love ceases to be a pleasure when it ceases to be a secret.”
The Lover's Watch, "Four o'Clock General Conversation" (1686).