“There is only one pleasure—that of being alive. All the rest is misery.”

“Heaven is filled with only unimaginable pleasures and promises the absence of miseries.”

Mwanandeke Kindembo (1996) Congolese author

“Reading is pleasure and happiness to be alive or sadness to be alive and above all it's knowledge and questions.”

Roberto Bolaño book 2666

“The misery of being exploited by capitalists is nothing compared to the misery of not being exploited at all.”

Joan Robinson (1903–1983) English economist

“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.”

Emil M. Cioran (1911–1995) Romanian philosopher and essayist

“Hell is being alive, and being alive is all there is.”

Michael Marshall Smith (1965) British novelist, screenwriter and short story writer

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

Mwanandeke Kindembo (1996) Congolese author

“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.”

J. Howard Moore (1862–1916)

“Of all the animals, man is the only one that is cruel. He is the only one that inflicts pain for the pleasure of doing it.”

Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist

“None can usurp this height…
But those to whom the miseries of the world
Are misery, and will not let them rest.”

John Keats (1795–1821) English Romantic poet