Quotes about pleasure
page 21

“Now, if ever, we ought to be able to appreciate the whole importance of the stand which was made by our forefathers against the House of Stuart. All around us the world is convulsed by the agonies of great nations. Governments which lately seemed likely to stand during ages have been on a sudden shaken and overthrown. … Meanwhile in our island the regular course of government has never been for a day interrupted. The few bad men who longed for license and plunder have not had the courage to confront for one moment the strength of a loyal nation, rallied in firm array round a parental throne. And, if it be asked what has made us to differ from others, the answer is that we never lost what others are wildly and blindly seeking to regain. It is because we had a preserving revolution in the seventeenth century that we have not had a destroying revolution in the nineteenth. It is because we had freedom in the midst of servitude that we have order in the midst of anarchy. For the authority of law, for the security of property, for the peace of our streets, for the happiness of our houses, our gratitude is due, under Him who raises and pulls down nations at his pleasure, to the Long Parliament, to the Convention, and to William of Orange.”

Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay (1800–1859) British historian and Whig politician

Vol. II, ch. 10
History of England (1849–1861)

Men, Bad luck, Happiness, Age

“Science and Religion both fail to give a reasonable reply. Science does not pretend to be able to give the solution, saying that the examination of things as they are is enough of a task; religion offers an explanation both illogical and unmeaning and acceptable but to the bigot, as it requires us to consider the whole of Nature as a mystery and to seek for the meaning and purpose of life with all its sorrow in the pleasure of a God who cannot be found out. The educated and enquiring mind knows that dogmatic religion can only give an answer invented by man while it pretends to be from God.”

William Quan Judge (1851–1896) American occult writer

The Ocean of Theosophy by William Q. Judge (1893), Chapter 8, Of Reincarnation

Life, God, Education, Religion

“When the people of St-Domingue first tasted the fruit of liberty that they hold from the equity of France; when to the violent upheavals of the revolution that announced it succeeded the pleasures of tranquility; when finally the rule of law took the place of anarchy under which the unfortunate colony had too long suffered, what fatality can have led the greatest enemy of its prosperity and of our happiness still to dare to threaten us with the return of slavery?”

Toussaint Louverture (1743–1803) Leader of the Haitian Revolution

Letter to the French Directory, November 1792

Happiness, People, Law, Suffering

“We are living although the majority of the people do not realize it, in the midst of an immense revolution. What is radically wrong with our condition lies in the harsh contrast between rich and poor. This cannot go on forever, as we are human beings with human differences. No use is being made of religion, the only way towards alleviation and compensation; on the contrary, attempts are being deliberately made to excite the masses into asserting their equality with the middle and upper classes. The State contents itself with attempts to improve the material circumstances of the workers, with the only result that their covetousness has been intensified. The possibility of acquiring great sums of money by speculation has developed a fondness for luxury and enjoyment which has taken hold of wide circles. German family life is going to the dogs. Unfortunate marriages, divorces, youthful corruption, pleasure-seeking, the anxiety to seem richer than one is–all this is increasing terribly. In the lower classes of the great cities the demoralization has already reached a high degree … The unequal distribution of wealth with all its consequences must lead in the end to a catastrophe.”

Alfred von Waldersee (1832–1904) Prussian Field Marshal

Waldersee in his diary, 9 November 1890

Life, Money, Marriage, People

“Professor Einstein would not have liked a stuffy tribute. My wife and I loved him. He was a charter subscriber to the Weekly, and often strained its primitive bookkeeping facilities by renewing when no renewal was due. We and our three children had the great pleasure on several occasions of having tea with him at his home. It was like going to tea with God, not the terrible old God of the Bible but the little child’s father-in-heaven, very kind, very wise and yet himself very much like a child, too…”

I. F. Stone (1907–1989) American investigative journalist and author

Stone's obituary tribute to Einstein, April 1955, reprinted in The Best of I. F. Stone and quoted in I. F. Stone Remembered, 22 September 2006, radioopensource.org http://radioopensource.org/if-stone-remembered/,

Love, God, Children, Making love

“The greatest physical pleasure in the world is the meeting of the two urinary tracts.”

Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (1058–1111) Persian Muslim theologian, jurist, philosopher, and mystic

World

“It is not a pleasure for any President of the United States, as I am sure it was not a pleasure for my predecessors, to come before the Congress and ask for new appropriations which place burdens on our people. I came to this conclusion with some reluctance. But in my judgment, this is a most serious time in the life of our country and in the life of freedom around the globe, and it is the obligation, I believe, of the President of the United States to at least make his recommendations to the Members of the Congress, so that they can reach their own conclusions with that judgment before them. You must decide yourselves, as I have decided, and I am confident that whether you finally decide in the way that I have decided or not, that your judgment--as my judgment--is reached on what is in the best interests of our country.”

John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) 35th president of the United States of America

May 1961 in address to joint session of congress https://www.jfklibrary.org/learn/about-jfk/historic-speeches/address-to-joint-session-of-congress-may-25-196125 1961

Life, People, Making love, Way

“ICELANDER: So say all the philosophers. But since that which is destroyed suffers, and that which is born from its destruction also suffers in due course, and finally is in its turn destroyed, would you enlighten me on one point, about which hitherto no philosopher has satisfied me? For whose pleasure and service is this wretched life of the world maintained, by the suffering and death of all the beings which compose it?”

Giacomo Leopardi (1798–1837) Italian poet, philosopher and writer

Essays and Dialogues (1882), Dialogue between Nature and an Icelander

Life, Death, World, Suffering

“Death is not an evil, because it frees us from all evils, and while it takes away good things, it takes away also the desire for them. Old age is the supreme evil, because it deprives us of all pleasures, leaving us only the appetite for them, and it brings with it all sufferings. Nevertheless, we fear death, and we desire old age.”

Giacomo Leopardi (1798–1837) Italian poet, philosopher and writer

Thoughts. Translation by J.G. Nichols [Hesperus Press, 2002, ISBN 9781843910121], p. 6
Aphorisms

Death, Age, Fear, Suffering

“He suggests that mates should practice a variety of sexual postures in order to prevent mechanicality and predictability and to enhance the pleasure. He also points out the erotozones of a woman’s body and how different erotozones are awakened at different times according to the lunar influence.”

Vātsyāyana Indian logician

Source: Literary Vision, p. 164

Time

“If the opposing of one cock to fight with another may be justly esteemed a national barbarism, what shall be said of a custom more inhuman, which authorised the throwing at them with sticks, and ferociously putting them to a painful and lingering death? I know not at what time this unfortunate animal became the object of such wicked and wanton abuse: the sport, if such a denomination may be given to it, is certainly no recent invention, and perhaps is alluded to by Chaucer…If the poor bird by chance had its legs broken, or was otherwise so lamed as not to be able to stand, the barbarous owners were wont to support it with sticks, in order to prolong the pleasure received from the reiteration of its torment.”

Joseph Strutt (1749–1802) British engraver, artist, antiquary and writer

pg. 283
The Sports and Pastimes of the People of England (1801), Public entertainment

Death, Pain, Support, Bird

“Happily, His Highness is to-day ruling wisely a contented people and it is sufficient to say that I found in him a kind and considerate Chief and a loyal friend. On young shoulders he carried a head of extraordinary maturity which was, however, no bar to a boyish and whole-hearted enjoyment of manly sports as well as of the simple pleasures of life.”

Krishna Raja Wadiyar IV (1884–1940) King of Mysore

Sir Evan Machonochie in his book “Life in the Indian Civil Service. Modern_Mysore, Dr. B. R. Ambedkar Open University, 26 November 2013, archive.org, 198 http://archive.org/stream/modernmysore035292mbp/modernmysore035292mbp_djvu.txt, From Modern Mysore

Life, People, Sport, Heart

“Twenty-five years in the industry for him, 25 films with him for me… It gives me great pleasure to realise that I too have had some small role to play in his success.”

Rajinikanth (1950) Indian actor

Rajini acts in front of the camera, never behind it' (22 December 1999)

Success

“We have gone out several times this summer to gather simples and linden blossoms, etc. In each excursion we discover something marvelous, beautiful, and useful in the magnificent forests of Indiana. At each step we can admire the grandeur, the power, the goodness of God. How bountifully He provides for all our wants -- I would even say for our pleasures! I love our woods and solitude very much; …”

Théodore Guérin (1798–1856) Catholic saint and nun from France

To the Right Reverend J. Bouvier, Bishop of Le Mans, Saint Mary-of-the-Woods, 1850-07-10.

Love, God, Making love, Beauty

“He had no principles of religion, virtue, or friendship. Pleasure, frolic, or extravagant diversion, was all that he laid to heart. He was true to nothing, for he was not true to himself.”

George Villiers, 2nd Duke of Buckingham (1628–1687) English statesman and poet

Gilbert Burnet History of His Own Time (London: William S. Orr, 1850)

Friendship, Religion, Heart

“Nobody on this planet had a range of passing like Paul Scholes. Training every day was a pleasure just watching him. Unbelievable career.”

Paul Scholes (1974) English footballer

http://twitter.com/#!/themichaelowen
Michael Owen

Training

“Depression is seductive: it offends and teases, frightens you and draws you in, tempting you with its promise of sweet oblivion, then overwhelming you with a nearly sexual power, squirming past your defenses, dissolving your will, invading the tired spirit so utterly that it becomes difficult to recall that you ever lived without it…or to imagine that you might live that way again. With all the guile of Satan himself, depression persuades you that its invasion was all your own idea, that you wanted it all along. It fogs the part of the brain that reasons, that knows right and wrong. It captures you with its warm, guilty, hateful pleasures, and, worst of all, it becomes familiar.”

Stephen L. Carter book The Emperor of Ocean Park

All at once, you find yourself in thrall to the very thing that most terrifies you. Your work slides, your friendships slide, your marriage slides, but you scarcely notice: to be depressed is to be half in love with disaster.
Source: The Emperor of Ocean Park (2002), Ch. 12, A Special Delivery, II

Hate, Way, Imagination, Idea

“One of the advantages of having laws is the pleasure one may take in breaking them. We here are not children, Mr. Gurgeh.”

Iain Banks Culture series

Hamin waved the pipestem round the tables of people. “Rules and laws exist only because we take pleasure in doing what they forbid, but as long as most of the people obey such proscriptions most of the time, they have done their job; blind obedience would imply we are—ha!”—Hamin chuckled and pointed at the drone with the pipe—“no more than robots!”
Source: Culture series, The Player of Games (1988), Chapter 2 (p. 279).

Children, Law

“Gold, silver, jewels: dust, heaps of manure. Gratification, sensual pleasures, satisfaction of the appetites: like a beast, like a mule, like a cock, like a pig, like a bull. Honours, distinctions, titles: things of air, puffs of pride, lies, nothingness.”

Josemaría Escrivá book The Way

#677
The Way (1950)

“But if we look a little deeper we shall find there is a pathetic, one might almost say a tragic, side to the picture. A shy man means a lonely man—a man cut off from all companionship, all sociability. He moves about the world, but does not mix with it. Between him and his fellow-men there runs ever an impassable barrier—a strong, invisible wall that, trying in vain to scale, he but bruises himself against. He sees the pleasant faces and hears the pleasant voices on the other side, but he cannot stretch his hand across to grasp another hand. He stands watching the merry groups, and he longs to speak and to claim kindred with them. But they pass him by, chatting gayly to one another, and he cannot stay them. He tries to reach them, but his prison walls move with him and hem him in on every side. In the busy street, in the crowded room, in the grind of work, in the whirl of pleasure, amid the many or amid the few—wherever men congregate together, wherever the music of human speech is heard and human thought is flashed from human eyes, there, shunned and solitary, the shy man, like a leper, stands apart. His soul is full of love and longing, but the world knows it not. The iron mask of shyness is riveted before his face, and the man beneath is never seen. Genial words and hearty greetings are ever rising to his lips, but they die away in unheard whispers behind the steel clamps. His heart aches for the weary brother, but his sympathy is dumb. Contempt and indignation against wrong choke up his throat, and finding no safety-valve whence in passionate utterance they may burst forth, they only turn in again and harm him. All the hate and scorn and love of a deep nature such as the shy man is ever cursed by fester and corrupt within, instead of spending themselves abroad, and sour him into a misanthrope and cynic.”

Jerome K. Jerome book Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow

Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow (1886)

Love, Men, Hate, World

“Heath has touched so many people on so many different levels during his short life but few had the pleasure of truly knowing him. He was a down to earth, generous, kind-hearted, life-loving, unselfish individual who was extremely inspirational to many.”

Heath Ledger (1979–2008) Australian actor

Kim Ledger, father of Heath Ledger, in an on-camera public statement after learning of his son's death, in Perth, on January 23, BBC News, Entertainment|publisher=bbc.co.uk (BBC)|date=January 23, 2008|accessdate=2008-08-23}}
[Kareen Wynter, Actor Heath Ledger Dead at 28, http://www.cnn.com/2008/SHOWBIZ/Movies/01/22/heath.ledger.dead/index.html#cnnSTCText, CNN, Web, cnn.com (Time Warner), January 22, 2008, Entertainment, 2008-08-22]

Love, Life, People, Making love

“If we make any kind of decent, useful life for ourselves we have less need to run from it to those diminishing pleasures of the movies. When we go to the movies we want something good, something sustained, we don’t want to settle for just a bit of something, because we have other things to do. If life at home is more interesting, why go to the movies? And the theatres frequented by true moviegoers — those perennial displaced persons in each city, the loners and the losers — depress us. Listening to them — and they are often more audible than the sound track — as they cheer the cons and jeer the cops, we may still share their disaffection, but it’s not enough to keep us interested in cops and robbers. A little nose-thumbing isn’t enough. If we’ve grown up at the movies we know that good work is continuous not with the academic, respectable tradition but with the glimpses of something good in trash, but we want the subversive gesture carried to the domain of discovery. Trash has given us an appetite for art.”

Pauline Kael book Going Steady

Going Steady (1969), Trash, Art and the Movies (February 1969)

Life, Making love, Art, Home

“The most sensational of all the sick literary lives was that of Maupassant, who died mad at forty-three and whose hatred of God, man and nature - manifested in literary productions which give us immense pleasure: how is that to be explained?”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

spring from a kind of mother fixation as well as a terror of the cold. He was a bull of a man much given to boats and riparian dalliance, but he had bad circulation. He had other things too, including a Chinese-style priapism which enabled him to copulate, usually in public, six times in a row, the secret being his failure to detumesce. This, of course, like acne and the common cold, can be a symptom of tertiary syphilis, which Maupassant certainly had.
Non-Fiction, Homage to QWERT YUIOP: Selected Journalism 1978-1985 (1986)

God, Nature, Madness

“In the fields workers are planting maize seeds under the direction of an overseer with staff and headdress. Close-up of a worker’s face. Whatever it is that makes a man a man, all feeling and all soul has gone out in that face. Nothing is left but body needs and body pleasures. I have seen faces like that in the back wards of state hospitals for the insane. Faces that live to eat, shit and masturbate.”

William S. Burroughs book The Wild Boys

The Wild Boys (1971)

Making love, Feeling, Soul

“Jane Austen is thus a mistress of much deeper emotion than appears upon the surface. She stimulates us to supply what is not there. What she offers is, apparently, a trifle, yet is composed of something that expands in the reader’s mind and endows with the most enduring form of life scenes which are outwardly trivial. Always the stress is laid upon character. How, we are made to wonder, will Emma behave when Lord Osborne and Tom Musgrave make their call at five minutes before three, just as Mary is bringing in the tray and the knife-case? It is an extremely awkward situation. The young men are accustomed to much greater refinement. Emma may prove herself ill-bred, vulgar, a nonentity. The turns and twists of the dialogue keep us on the tenterhooks of suspense. Our attention is half upon the present moment, half upon the future. And when, in the end, Emma behaves in such a way as to vindicate our highest hopes of her, we are moved as if we had been made witnesses of a matter of the highest importance. Here, indeed, in this unfinished and in the main inferior story, are all the elements of Jane Austen’s greatness. It has the permanent quality of literature. Think away the surface animation, the likeness to life, and there remains, to provide a deeper pleasure, an exquisite discrimination of human values.”

Jane Austen (1775–1817) English novelist

Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader (1925)

Life, Men, Making love, Hope

“Why do the characters in Jane Austen give us a slightly new pleasure each time they come in, as opposed to the merely repetitive pleasure that is caused by a character in Dickens? Why do they combine so well in a conversation, and draw one another out, without seeming to do so, and never perform? The answer to this question can be put in several ways; that, unlike Dickens, she was a real artist, that she never stooped to caricature, etc. But the best reply is that her characters, though smaller than his, are more highly organized. They function all round, and even if her plot made greater demands on them than it does, they would still be adequate.”

Jane Austen (1775–1817) English novelist

E.M. Forster, Aspects of The Novel (1927)

Way, Question, Time, Drawing

“Emotions are continually affecting our thought processes and decisions, below the level of our awareness. And the most common emotion of them all is the desire for pleasure and the avoidance of pain. Our thoughts almost inevitably revolve around this desire; we simply recoil from entertaining ideas that are unpleasant or painful to us. We imagine we are looking for the truth, or being realistic, when in fact we are holding on to ideas that bring a release from tension and soothe our egos, make us feel superior. This pleasure principle in thinking is the source of all of our mental biases. If you believe that you are somehow immune to any of the following biases, it is simply an example of the pleasure principle in action. Instead, it is best to search and see how they continually operate inside you, as well as learn how to identify such irrationality in others.”

Robert Greene (1959) American author

Chap. 1 : Master Your Emotional Self
The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

Pain, Truth, Making love, Feeling

“Always fatuity, vulgarity, as soon as human passion is touched. […] Just as some poetry is of the eye (form, colour) and some of the ear, so Keats is of the palate. Not only has he constant reference to its pleasures, but the general sensation after reading him is one of tasting. 'What's the harm?”

E.M. Forster (1879–1970) English novelist

Well, taste for some reason or the other can't carry one far into the world of beauty—that reason being perhaps that though you don't want comradership there you do want the possibility of comradership, and A cannot swallow B's mouthful by any possibility:....and this exclusiveness (to maunder on) also attaches to the physical side of sex though not the least to the spiritual.
Letter 162, to Malcolm Darling, 1 December 1916
Selected Letters (1983-1985)

Passion, Reading

“Look, whatever else happiness is, it’s also some kind of chemical reaction. Your body making and experiencing a cocktail of hormones and other molecules in response to stimulus. Brain reward. A thing that feels good when you do it. We’ve had millions of years of evolution that gave a reproductive edge to people who experienced pleasure when something pro-survival happened. Those individuals did more of whatever made them happy, and if what they were doing more of gave them more and hardier offspring, then they passed this on.”
“Yes,” I said. “Sure. At some level, that’s true of all our emotions, I guess.”

Cory Doctorow (1971) Canadian-British blogger, journalist, and science fiction author

“I don’t know about that,” she said. “I’m just talking about happiness. The thing is, doing stuff is pro-survival—seeking food, seeking mates protecting children, thinking up better ways to hide from predators...Sitting still and doing nothing is almost never pro-survival, because the rest of the world is running around, coming up with strategies to outbreed you, to outcompete you for food and territory...If you stay still, they’ll race past you.”
Source: Short fiction, The Man Who Sold The Moon (2014), p. 130

Happiness, People, Making love, Feeling

“Seventy-two thousand of the flock stand prepared to break the Sabbath this coming Sunday. Break it? Nay, destroy, shatter utterly with screams of pleasure as they observe a large vulgar person, himself a confessed glutton, propel a sphere an unholy distance. Old Nick rides on Ruth's bat, else how could he smite the ball so far beyond the power of ordinary man? He is in league. Forbid the games. Cast this Ruth out into utter darkness. He creates joy annually for millions.”

Paul Gallico (1897–1976) American writer and journalist

"Stop the Series" http://www.mediafire.com/view/qp5h3rqswtjqui2/.jpeg (tongue-in-cheek, Prohibition-era tirade, regarding upcoming 1927 World Series), New York Daily News (October 5, 1927)

Game, Joy, Personality

“And though I cannot conceive how any person can shut his eyes to the general state of misery throughout the universe, I still think that it is for a wise purpose; that the evils of life, which could not properly be otherwise, will in the course of time be rectified, and the exquisite pleasures for which we are formed will be enjoyed in our progeny: also that we may ourselves become the inhabitants of the improved world, or of some other world improved in a like manner; and that even if the different species of all the present animals should become extinct, as indicated by what we have observed of the different bones in the several strata, the discoveries of the present time may enrich the future, unless every trace of them should be destroyed at once.”

Lewis Gompertz (1783–1861) Early animal rights activist

Source: Moral Inquiries on the Situation of Man and of Brutes (1824), Chapter 2, p. 48

Life, World, Thinking, Universe

“These considerations did not make us overlook the folly of premature attempts to dispense with the inducements of private interest in social affairs, while no substitute for them has been or can be provided: but we regarded all existing institutions and social arrangements as being (in a phrase I once heard from Austin) "merely provisional," and we welcomed with the greatest pleasure and interest all socialistic experiments by select individuals (such as the Co-operative Societies), which, whether they succeeded or failed, could not but operate as a most useful education of those who took part in them, by cultivating their capacity of acting upon motives pointing directly to the general good, or making them aware of the defects which render them and others incapable of doing so.”

John Stuart Mill book Autobiography

Source: Autobiography (1873)
Source: https://archive.org/details/autobiography01mill/page/233/mode/1up pp. 233-234

Education, Making love, Motivation, Parting

“Love not Pleasure; love God.”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

Bk. II, ch. 9.
1830s, Sartor Resartus (1833–1834)

Love, God, Making love

“I should think that for one who has tasted the joys of creation, no other pleasure could exist.”

Anton Chekhov The Seagull

Anna to Trigorin, Act I
The Seagull (1896)
Original: (ru) Но, я думаю, кто испытал наслаждение творчества, для того уже все другие наслаждения не существуют.

Thinking, Joy

“Libraries are reservoirs of strength, grace, and wit, reminders of order, calm, and continuity, lakes of mental energy, neither warm nor cold, light nor dark. The pleasure they give is steady, unorgastic, reliable, deep, and long-lasting. In any library in the world, I am at home, unselfconscious, still, and absorbed.”

Germaine Greer (1939) Australian feminist author

"Still in Melbourne, January 1987", as quoted in [Fred R Shapiro, The Yale Book of Quotations, https://books.google.com/books?id=ck6bXqt5shkC, 2006, Yale University Press, 0-300-10798-6, 324]
Daddy, We Hardly Knew You (1989)

World, Home, Light

“And now, with gleams of half-extinguished thought,
With many recognitions dim and faint,
And somewhat of a sad perplexity,
The picture of the mind revives again:
While here I stand, not only with the sense
Of present pleasure, but with pleasing thoughts
That in this moment there is life and food
For future years. And so I dare to hope,
Though changed, no doubt, from what I was when first
I came among these hills;”

William Wordsworth book Lyrical Ballads

Stanza 3
Lyrical Ballads (1798–1800), Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey (1798)

Life, Sadness, Food, Hope

“These beauteous forms,
Through a long absence, have not been to me
As is a landscape to a blind man's eye:
But oft, in lonely rooms, and 'mid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them,
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;
And passing even into my purer mind,
With tranquil restoration:—feelings too
Of unremembered pleasure: such, perhaps,
As have no slight or trivial influence
On that best portion of a good man's life,
His little, nameless, unremembered acts
Of kindness and of love. Nor less, I trust,
To them I may have owed another gift,
Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood,
In which the burthen of the mystery,
In which the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world
Is lighten'd:—that serene and blessed mood,
In which the affections gently lead us on,—
Until, the breath of this corporeal frame
And even the motion of our human blood
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul:
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.”

William Wordsworth book Lyrical Ballads

Stanza 2
Lyrical Ballads (1798–1800), Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey (1798)

Love, Life, World, Making love

“I want to make films that are about visual pleasure for women. Not worry about whether they are in fashion, whether they are politically correct.”

Anna Biller (1965) film director

Under the Influence: Anna Biller on DONKEY SKIN - 14 Feb 2017, at 4 Min 02 Sec https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DD9MrwcE7o8 From interview with The Criterion Collection

Women, Making love, Fashion

“It's a measure of treasure that gives me the pleasure
Of loving you the way I do
And you know I would gladly say I need your love badly
And bring these little things to you.
Cause you got gold
Gold inside of you
You got gold
Gold inside of you
Well I got some Gold inside me too”

John Prine (1946–2020) American country singer/songwriter

"You Got Gold" (Prine, Keith Sykes)
Song lyrics, The Missing Years (1991)

Love, Making love, Way

“It was easy to sound that confident; less easy to believe it in his heart. They had got this far did not give them an automatic guarantee of success. The world did not work like that. It took pleasure in punishing the cocksure.”

Alastair Reynolds book Terminal World

Source: Terminal World (2010), Chapter 24 (p. 455)

World, Confidence, Success, Heart

“Young man! Deny yourself satisfaction (of amusement, of debauchery, of love, etc.), not with the Stoical intention of complete abstinence, but with the refined Epicurean intention of having in view an ever-growing pleasure. This stinginess with the cash of your vital urge makes you definitely richer through the postponement of pleasure, even if you should, for the most part, renounce the indulgence of it until the end of your life. The awareness of having pleasure under your control is, like everything idealistic, more fruitful and more abundant than everything that satisfies the sense through indulgence because it is thereby simultaneously consumed and consequently lost from the aggregate of totality.”

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) German philosopher

Kant, Immanuel (1996), page 54.
Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798)

Love, Life, Making love, Sense

“Perhaps the concept of shame applies to only women but not men. Maybe because she was a ‘prostitute’ she was able to write crude depictions of sex without shame. In that case, it surely must not suit the supposed learned men to depict conjugal pleasures in the same way?”

Bangalore Nagarathnamma (1878–1952) Indian singer

as a sarcastic retort to criticism of the original work and her 1910 edition containing sexual/erotic passages, believed to being unsuitable for women Firstpost Article - An early 20th century tale of censorship - 22 Mar 2020 https://www.firstpost.com/living/an-early-20th-century-tale-of-censorship-how-bangalore-nagarathnamma-fought-social-norms-to-revive-the-legacy-of-muddupalani-8132331.html Archive https://web.archive.org/web/20200415202057/https://www.firstpost.com/living/an-early-20th-century-tale-of-censorship-how-bangalore-nagarathnamma-fought-social-norms-to-revive-the-legacy-of-muddupalani-8132331.html the wording of the quote is different in the sources provided(probably due to translation), but the tonality and meaning are similar. About Radhika Santawanam (Appeasing Radhika)

Women, Men, Sex, Way

“More than 99% of my wealth will go to philanthropy during my lifetime or at death. Measured by dollars, this commitment is large. In a comparative sense, though, many individuals give more to others every day.
Millions of people who regularly contribute to churches, schools, and other organizations thereby relinquish the use of funds that would otherwise benefit their own families. The dollars these people drop into a collection plate or give to United Way mean forgone movies, dinners out, or other personal pleasures. In contrast, my family and I will give up nothing we need or want by fulfilling this 99% pledge.
Moreover, this pledge does not leave me contributing the most precious asset, which is time. Many people, including — I’m proud to say — my three children, give extensively of their own time and talents to help others. Gifts of this kind often prove far more valuable than money.”

Warren Buffett (1930) American business magnate, investor, and philanthropist

" My Philanthropic Pledge http://givingpledge.org/pdf/letters/Buffett_Letter.pdf" at The Giving Pledge (2010)

Death, Money, Children, People

“The peace of the chitta (or mind stuff) can be brought about through the practice of sympathy, tenderness, steadiness of purpose, and dispassion in regard to pleasure or pain, or towards all forms of good or evil.”

Patañjali (-200–-150 BC) ancient Indian scholar(s) of grammar and linguistics, of yoga, of medical treatises

The Light of the Soul: Its Science and Effect : a paraphrase of the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, with commentary by Alice A. Bailey, (1927)

Pain, Peace, Evil

“Axiom 8. That the importance of any action is measured by the degree of pleasure or pain that it causes or prevents.”

Lewis Gompertz (1783–1861) Early animal rights activist

Moral Inquiries on the Situation of Man and of Brutes (1824)

Pain

“I wanted to paint crows in a big spot of lonely black with a digger head and paws. But stronger was nature which forced me to make a beast, sparkling of blue and purple, a subdued pleasure for the eyes.”

Jan Mankes (1889–1920) Dutch painter

translation from original Dutch: Fons Heijnsbroek

(original Dutch: citaat van Jan Mankes, in het Nederlands:) Ik wou kraaien schilderen in een groote plek van eenzaam zwart met doodgraverskop en pooten. Maar sterker was de natuur, die me een beest deed maken flonkerend van blauw en paars, een ingetogen oogenlust.

In a letter of Mankes to Annie van Beuningen-Eschauzier, 30 Nov. 1919; in particular collection; as cited Jan Mankes – in woord en beeld, ed. Sjoerd van Faassen; Museum Bèlvédère, Heerenveen, 2015 ISBN 1877-0983, n. 22, pp. 49-50
1915 - 1920

Making love, Nature, Painting

“I take flying saucers extremely seriously; but I deplore pedantry and, like the ancient Toltecs, I find the serious things of life a cause for joy and pleasure rather than for pompous gloom.”

George Adamski (1891–1965) American ufologist

Flying Saucers Have Landed

Life, Joy, Flying

Alice A. Bailey (1880–1949) esoteric, theosophist, writer

Source: The Light of the Soul: Its Science and Effect: a paraphrase of the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, with commentary (1927)

Pain, Peace, Evil

“We are the body of heaven
and the soul of etermity,
the desolation and pains of hell are within us,
the joy and pleasures of paradise also.
We finish at the start and with ending we begins
in the infinity of space-time the celestial ash wander.”

alexis karpouzos

mystic poetry and spirituality

Pain, Soul, Hell, Time

“If our definition of happiness is "experiencing that which is pleasurable," we are going to be disappointed a lot of the time.”

Noah Levine (1971) American Buddhist teacher

The Heart of the Revolution (2011)

Happiness, Disappointment, Time

“Happiness is closer to the experience of acceptance and contentment than it is to pleasure. True happiness exists as the spacious and compassionate heart's willingness to feel whatever is present.”

Noah Levine (1971) American Buddhist teacher

Against the Stream (2007)

Happiness, Feeling, Heart

“Without hope of reward
Provide help to others.
Bear suffering alone,
And share your pleasures with beggars.”

Nagarjuna (150–250) Indian philosopher

§ 272
Major attributed works, Ratnāvalī (Precious Garland)

Hope, Suffering, Help

“There is pleasure when a sore is scratched,
But to be without sores is more pleasurable still.
Just so, there are pleasures in worldly desires,
But to be without desires is more pleasurable still.”

Nagarjuna (150–250) Indian philosopher

§ 169
Major attributed works, Ratnāvalī (Precious Garland)

“I didn’t want to give the press the pleasure of seeing it.”

Donald J. Trump (1946) 45th President of the United States of America

Trump commented on why he didn't wear a face mask as a protection against the coronavirus at a visit to a factory, as quoted in * 2020-05-21
Trump Goes Without Mask For Public Tour of Michigan Factory, Says He ‘Didn’t Want to Give the Press the Pleasure’ of Seeing Him Wearing One
Madeleine Carlisle, 2020, May
Source: https://time.com/5840833/trump-michigan-ford-plant-tour-mask/

“We cannot be more sensitive to pleasure without being more sensitive to pain.”

Alan Watts book The Wisdom of Insecurity

Source: The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety

Pain

“Yes, star-crossed in pleasure, the stream flows on by
Yes, as we're sated in leisure, we watch it fly, yes
And time waits for no one, and it won't wait for me...
Hours are like diamonds, don't let them waste...
Drink in your summer, gather your corn...
The dreams of the nighttime will vanish by dawn”

Mick Jagger (1943) British rock musician, member of The Rolling Stones

Time Waits for No One (co-written with Keith Richards) on the Rolling Stones' 1974 album It's Only Rock 'n Roll (1973).
Lyrics

Dreams, Star, Drink, Time

“Diversions come and go. Pleasure never lasts. Variety loses its meaning. But you will always be able to choose what you are willing to sacrifice, what you are willing to give up.”

Mark Manson book Everything Is Fucked

“The continuation of diachrony in perceptions of life and death spreads across a form of antinatalism essentially co-opted from a kind of Western fetishism of Buddhism, namely efilism. Coming etymologically from the reverse of 'life', efilism claims it is better never to have been. Efilist philosophers such as David Benatar hinge their arguments on basic binaries of pleasure and pain which roughly correlate to good and bad and extend to a vindication of life and death. Efilism has a vague correspondence with utilitarianism but emphasizes the suffering of life over utilitarianism's greater good. Both are absolute in their perception of the capacity to evaluate which is which, making both dependent on economic measure of value as an either/or, and to an extent both on (anthropocentric) determinism. Efilism's redeeming feature is that it promotes antinatalism, and often veganism, in its aspirations to a reduction in suffering, and this attitude promises potentials for opening the world through the cessation of the human.”

Patricia MacCormack Australian Scholar

Embracing Death, pp. 152-153
The Ahuman Manifesto: Activism for the End of the Anthropocene (2020)

Life, Death, Pain, Bad luck

“Not in the time of pleasure
Hope doth set her bow;
But in the sky of sorrow,
Over the vale of woe. Through gloom and shadow look we
On beyond the years!
The soul would have no rainbow
Had the eyes no tears.”

John Vance Cheney (1848–1922) American writer

The Century Vol. 44, Issue 4 (August 1892)
Tears (1892)

Hope, Soul, Tear, Time

“When we are young, we take a certain pleasure in our infirmities. They seem so new, so rich! With age, they no longer surprise us, we know them too well. Now, without anything unexpected in them, they do not deserve to be endured.”

Emil M. Cioran book The Trouble With Being Born

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

Age

“Hate comes from the past, fear from the future. Pain and pleasure are now, and therefore their own trap.”

Steven Barnes (1952) American writer and author

Source: Street Lethal (1983), Chapter 16 “Warrior” (p. 234)

Pain, Hate, Fear, Past

“And therefore just as a brigand caught in broad daylight in the act cannot persuade us that he did not lift his knife in order to rob his victim of his purse, and had no thought of killing him, we too, it would seem, cannot persuade ourselves or others that the soldiers and policemen around us are not to guard us, but only for defense against foreign foes, and to regulate traffic and fetes and reviews; we cannot persuade ourselves and others that we do not know that the men do not like dying of hunger, bereft of the right to gain their subsistence from the earth on which they live; that they do not like working underground, in the water, or in the stifling heat, for ten to fourteen hours a day, at night in factories to manufacture objects for our pleasure. One would imagine it impossible to deny what is so obvious. Yet it is denied.”

Leo Tolstoy The Kingdom of God Is Within You

Source: The Kingdom of God is Within You (1894), Chapter XII, Conclusion—Repent Ye, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at Hand

Men, Hunger, Imagination, Water

“We know very well that we are only allowed to go on eating our dinner, to finish seeing the new play, or to enjoy to the end the ball, the Christmas fete, the promenade, the races or, the hunt, thanks to the policeman's revolver or the soldier's rifle, which will shoot down the famished outcast who has been robbed of his share, and who looks round the corner with covetous eyes at our pleasures, ready to interrupt them instantly, were not policeman and soldier there prepared to run up at our first call for help.”

Leo Tolstoy The Kingdom of God Is Within You

Source: The Kingdom of God is Within You (1894), Chapter XII, Conclusion—Repent Ye, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at Hand

Help, Christmas

“Men are not zoophilists (being-lovers). Not many of them are philanthropists (man-lovers). They are barbarians. And the wrongs inflicted by them on non-human beings are for the most part inflicted simply because they feel like it. Human nature is so constructed that men get pleasure out of doing the most monstrous deeds. It is worse than this. Human nature is so constructed that it contains elements which demand exercise, demand motor expression, and in whose expression the most lamentable and appalling effects are produced.”

J. Howard Moore (1862–1916)

Source: The New Ethics (1907), The Perils of Over-population, p. 154

Men, Feeling, Exercises, Lovers

“The truth is that the connection of Ireland with England has been full of trouble, and I fear there is no remedy. ... It is a chronic disease, and even if it is not to be cured we have proved in the past that we can get on with it and yet carry on our Empire to a vast pitch of prosperity. What has been done in the past can be done in the future. ... [D]o not let us attempt to cure it by a measure which will put this island into a condition which never during 700 years of our history has existed—which will hand over those who have had the courage to defend us to the maltreatment of their worst enemies, and which will establish at our very doors a post—a hostile post—which will be at the pleasure of any foreign power which may sometimes be hostile to us.”

Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury (1830–1903) British politician

Speech to a banquet of the Merchant Taylors' Company, London (10 May 1886), quoted in The Times (11 May 1886), p. 12
1880s

Hostility, Truth, Fear, Disease

“Yet another of these useless, pestilential little creatures! All his life the author has suffered from his susceptibility to this kind of female. The commentator has suffered all his life too from the same weakness. Other people derive pleasure from encountering such characters in their reading, but I, because of the harm they have done me in real life, derive only pain. The susceptible author is extremely grateful for the comment!”

Zhiyanzhai

Comment on a scene involving Baoyu with the maid Number Four in chapter 21, as reported and quoted by John Minford in Berkshire Dictionary of Chinese Biography, ed. Kerry Brown, Vol. III (Berkshire Publishing Group, 2017), p. 1109

Life, Pain, People, Suffering

“Magic is an instrument of divine goodness or demoniac pride, but it is the annihilation of earthly joys and the pleasures of mortal life.”

Eliphas Levi (1810–1875) French writer

Miscellaneous Quotes On the Subjects of Magic and Magicians
Source: Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magi Part I: The Doctrine of Transcendental Magic By Eliphas Levi (Alphonse Louis Constant), Translated by A. E. Waite, England, Rider & Company, England, 1896, p. 53

Life, Joy

“…why did we wait for any thing? — why not seize the pleasure at once?”

Jane Austen book Emma

How often is happiness destroyed by preparation, foolish preparation!
Emma (1815)
Works, Emma

Waiting

“Ah cannot we
As well as cocks and lions jocund be,
After such pleasures?”

John Donne (1572–1631) English poet

Farewell to Love, stanza 3

“Economy in pleasure is not to my taste.”

Giacomo Casanova (1725–1798) Italian adventurer and author from the Republic of Venice

Memoirs of J. Casanova de Seingalt (1894)

“Art is contemplation. It is the pleasure of the mind which searches into nature and which there divines the spirit by which Nature herself is animated. It is the joy of the intellect which sees clearly into the Universe and which recreates it, with conscientious vision. Art is the most sublime mission of man, since it is the expression of thought seeking to understand the world and to make it understood.”

Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) French sculptor

Preface, p. 7-8
1910s, Art, 1912

World, Making love, Art, Search

“Both Stoicism and Epicureanism — the apathetic acceptance of defeat, and the effort to forget defeat in the arms of pleasure — were theories as to how one might yet be happy though subjugated or enslaved; precisely as the stoicism of Schopenhauer and the despondent epicureanism of Renan were in the nineteenth century the symbols of a shattered revolution and a broken France.”

Will Durant book The Story of Philosophy

The Story of Philosophy (1926)

Happiness, Effort, Forgetting

“Most of us have managed to hang on to a few good friends. They may not be battle buddies, but they've found a way to stay in our lives, and we're in theirs for the long haul. When that's the case, we have certain responsibilities to them. Sometimes we have the pleasure of applauding their accomplishments or sharing happy occasions with them. But, when necessary, we also owe it to them to be truth-tellers. And we have to hope they'll be equally straightforward with us.”

William G. Boykin (1948) Recipient of the Purple Heart medal

Source: Man to Man: Rediscovering Masculinity in a Challenging World (2020), p. 119

Happiness, Truth, Hope, Way

“God has filled our hearts with desires so vast and so magnificent that nothing in creation is capable of satisfying them. Thus it is that in the hope of finding some pleasure, we attach ourselves to created objects and that we have no sooner possessed and sampled that which we have so ardently desired than we turn to something else, hoping to find what we wanted. We are, then, through our own experience, constrained to admit that it is but useless for us to want to derive our happiness here below from transient things. If we hope to have any consolation in this world, it will only be by despising the things which are passing and which have no lasting value and in striving towards the noble and happy end for which God has created us. Do you want to be happy, my friends? Fix your eyes on Heaven; it is there that your hearts will find that which will satisfy them completely.”

John Vianney (1786–1859) French priest and saint

Do You Want to Be Happy?

God, Happiness, World, Hope

“It is the nature of the wise to resist pleasures, but the foolish to be a slave to them.”

Epictetus (50–138) philosopher from Ancient Greece

Nature

“Marriage is the highest state of friendship. If happy, it lessens our cares by dividing them, at the same time that it doubles our pleasures by mutual participation.”

Samuel Richardson (1689–1761) English writer and printer

Friendship, Marriage, Happiness, Time

“In the sweetness of friendship let there be laughter, and sharing of pleasures. For in the dew of little things the heart finds its morning and is refreshed.”

Khalil Gibran (1883–1931) Lebanese artist, poet, and writer

Friendship, Laughter, Heart, Friendship

“To me, issues of pleasure should not be mixed with issues of life and death. All said and done, I stand with the position of the Catholic Church.”

John Baptist Odama (1947) born 1947; Roman-Catholic Archbishop of Gulu, Uganda

African Archbishop Reflects on Challenges to Marriage and Family https://www.ncregister.com/news/african-archbishop-reflects-on-challenges-to-marriage-and-family (October 10, 2014)

Life, Death

“We are in danger of forgetting that God is not only a comfort but a joy. He is the source of all pleasures; he is fun and laughter, and we are meant to enjoy him.”

Joy Davidman (1915–1960) American poet

Smoke on the Mountain: An Interpretation of the Ten Commandment

God, Laughter, Joy, Forgetting

“No enjoyment on this sad old earth has come even close to the unending pleasures that God has prepared 'for those that love Him.”

Ray Comfort (1949) New Zealand-born Christian minister and evangelist

This is the teaching of the Bible. And you are going to miss out, simply because you refuse to change your mind, repent, and trust the Saviour.
You Can Lead an Atheist to Evidence, But You Can't Make Him Think (2009)

Love, God, Sadness

“And time will cease to exist, because in the land of pleasure-born-of-true-love, everything is infinite.”

Paulo Coelho book Manuscript Found in Accra

Manuscript Found in Accra (2012), About sex

Love, Time

“When we are too generous in the sexual act and our main preoccupation is with our partner’s pleasure, our own pleasure can be diminished or even destroyed.”

Paulo Coelho book Manuscript Found in Accra

Manuscript Found in Accra (2012), About sex

“If two bodies merely join together, that is not sex, it is merely pleasure. Sex goes far beyond pleasure. In sex, relaxation and tension go hand in hand, as do pain and pleasure, shyness and the courage to go beyond one’s limits.”

Paulo Coelho book Manuscript Found in Accra

Manuscript Found in Accra (2012), About sex

Pain, Sex, Courage

“Whether it is energy, time, talent or pleasure, only when you are overflowing can you really share it.”

Nithyananda (1978) Indian guru

Living Enlightenment

Time

“It takes less effort to stream a film at home these days. However, streaming should not fundamentally affect how a film is made, as long as the pleasure of watching films doesn’t change, and we as filmmakers continue to serve that purpose.”

Wong Kar-wai (1958) Hong Kong screenwriter, film producer and film director

"5 Questions for Wong Kar Wai" in Notebook Feature (19 March 2021) https://mubi.com/notebook/posts/5-questions-for-wong-kar-wai

Home, Effort, Change

“[T]he church does not preach the gospel at the pleasure of any administration or decline to preach it at another administration’s displeasure. We preach at Christ’s pleasure.”

Michael Horton (theologian) (1964) American theologian

What Are Evangelicals Afraid of Losing? (2018)

Christ

“Death is regarded as an evil and our minds are only meditating upon life itself, and never upon the destroyer of pleasure, which is death.”

Mwanandeke Kindembo (1996) Congolese author

Life, Death, Evil

“The word 'enough' doesn’t exist inside our minds when it comes on achieving and receiving for our pleasure.”

Mwanandeke Kindembo (1996) Congolese author

“You cannot expect to keep receiving without giving something back, or paying the price for every pleasure that you wish to enjoy.”

Mwanandeke Kindembo (1996) Congolese author

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

Mwanandeke Kindembo (1996) Congolese author

Pain

“Stoicism will teach you to smile at pain and frown at the sight of too much pleasure.”

Mwanandeke Kindembo (1996) Congolese author

Pain, Smile

“Erotica is as different from pornography as love is from rape, as dignity is from humiliation, as partnership is from slavery, as pleasure is from pain.”

Gloria Steinem (1934) American feminist and journalist

Erotica and Pornography: A Clear and Present Difference. Ms. November 1978, p. 53. & Pornography—Not Sex but the Obscene Use of Power. Ms. August 1977, p. 43. Both retrieved November 16, 2014.

Love, Pain, Partnership

“Initially what is important is to be able to successfully make a useful object over which the maker can exclaim, with pleasure and amazement, 'I made this myself!”

William Coperthwaite (1930–2013) American yurt builder

Page 99
A Handmade Life: In Search of Simplicity

“Virtue is achieved by its seekers not without a struggle; nor is abstinence from the paths of pleasure a painless process to human nature.”

Gregory of Nyssa (335–395) bishop of Nyssa

On Infants' Early Deaths

Nature

“A large array of options may discourage customers because it forces an increase in the effort that goes into making the decision. ...[T]hinking about the attractions of some of the unchosen options detracts from the pleasure derived from the chosen one.”

Barry Schwartz book The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less

The Paradox of Choice (2004)

Decision, Effort

“A woman loves to be obeyed at first, although afterwards she finds her pleasure in obeying.”

Robert Louis Stevenson book The Suicide Club

The Suicide Club, Story of the Physician and the Saratoga Trunk.
The New Arabian Nights (1882)

Love

“...The sublime feeling is not mere pleasure as taste is – it is a mixture of pleasure and pain... Confronted with objects that are too big according to their magnitude or too violent according to their power, the mind experiences its own limitations.”

Jean-François Lyotard (1924–1998) French philosopher

Source: Thought Without a Body? (1994)
Perigrenations Law Form

Pain, Feeling

“Stability is of huge significance to the future of our region. And I have to express great pleasure, and it is a huge potential and advantage that Serbia has, and that is that in Serbia there is political stability. On our part we will do everything to make a contribution to regional stability.”

Ivica Dačić (1966) Serbian politician

Source: "ΙΒΝΑ-Exclusive Interview-Ivica Dacic: Stability is of huge importance to the future of our region" in Independent Balkan News Agency https://balkaneu.com/ibna-exclusive-interview-ivica-dacic-stability-is-of-huge-importance-to-the-future-of-our-region/ (20 May 2017)

Future, Parting

“The qualities of saintliness are; withdrawal from the world, inclining the soul awat from it, leaving all settled bodies, keeping constantly to travel, denying the carnal soul its pleasures, purifying conduct, cleansing the conscience, dilation of breast and quality of the leadership.”

Abu Bakr al-Kalabadhi Sufi Maturidi scholar and Hanafi jurist

Source: The Sayings and Teachings of the Great Mystics of Islam (2004), p. 83

World, Travel, Soul

“Chaos delights in creation but swiftly becomes bored with what it creates for it seeks not order or justice or constancy but sensation, entertainment. Sometimes it suits it to create something which you and I would value or find pleasure in. But it is an accident.”

Michael Moorcock book The King of the Swords

Source: Book 2, Chapter 2 “The Castle Built of Blood” (p. 320), Corum, The King of the Swords (1971)

Justice

Quotes about pleasure page 21

Quotes about pleasure
page 21