Quotes about pleasure
page 5

“Whereas the beautiful is limited, the sublime is limitless, so that the mind in the presence of the sublime, attempting to imagine what it cannot, has pain in the failure but pleasure in contemplating the immensity of the attempt”

Immanuel Kant book Critique of Pure Reason

Source: Critique of Pure Reason

Pain, Beauty, Imagination, Failure

“We live in a world where joy and empathy and pleasure are all around us, there for the noticing.”

Ira Glass (1959) American radio personality

World, Joy

“We are so constituted that we can gain intense pleasure only from the contrast, and only very little from the condition itself.”

Sigmund Freud book Civilization and Its Discontents

Source: Civilization and Its Discontents

“… why did we wait for any thing? — why not seize the pleasure at once? — How often is happiness destroyed by preparation, foolish preparation!”

Jane Austen book Emma

Source: Emma (1815)

Happiness, Waiting

“And the pleasures and rewards of the intellect are inseparable from angst, uncertainty, conflict and even despair.”

Christopher Hitchens Letters to a Young Contrarian

Source: Letters to a Young Contrarian

Despair

“ABSTAINER, n. A weak person who yields to the temptation of denying himself a pleasure.”

Ambrose Bierce (1842–1914) American editorialist, journalist, short story writer, fabulist, and satirist

The Devil's Dictionary (1911)
Source: The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary
Context: Abstainer, n. A weak person who yields to the temptation of denying himself a pleasure. A total abstainer is one who abstains from everything but abstention, and especially from inactivity in the affairs of others.

Personality

“I am absolutely convinced that meaninglessness does not come from being weary of pain; meaninglessness comes from being weary of pleasure. And that is why we find ourselves emptied of meaning with our pantries still full.”

Ravi Zacharias (1946) Indian philosopher

Source: Can Man Live Without God

Pain

“God’s will and desire—His pleasure—is that we love Him. We cannot please God unless we love Him. We cannot love Him unless we know Him, and we cannot know Him unless we have faith in Him.”

Myles Munroe (1954–2014) Bahamian Evangelical Christian minister

Source: The Purpose and Power of Love & Marriage

Love, God, Faith

“Every morning upon awakening, I experience a supreme pleasure: that of being Salvador Dalí, and I ask myself, wonderstruck, what prodigious thing will he do today, this Salvador Dalí.”

Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) Spanish artist

quote of 1953; as cited in Smithsonian magazine.
Variants:
Every morning when I wake up, I experience an exquisite joy — the joy of being Salvador Dalí — and I ask myself in rapture: What wonderful things is this Salvador Dalí going to accomplish today?
Every morning when I awake, the greatest of joys is mine: that of being Salvador Dalí.
Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1951 - 1960

“Anticipation is the greater part of pleasure.”

Angela Carter (1940–1992) English novelist

Source: The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories

Parting

“Maybe there is no better novel in the world than Denton Welch's In Youth Is Pleasure. Just holding it in my hands, so precious, so beyond gay, so deliciously subversive, is enough to make illiteracy a worse social crime than hunger.”

John Waters (1946) American filmmaker, actor, comedian and writer

Source: Role Models

Hunger, Youth, World

“every pleasure's got an edge of pain, pay your ticket and don't complain”

Bob Dylan (1941) American singer-songwriter, musician, author, and artist

Pain

“There were silences in my head. I could abandon myself completely to the pleasure of multiple relationships, to the beauty of the day, to the joys of the day. It was as if a cancer in me had ceased gnawing me. The cancer of introspection.”

Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) writer of novels, short stories, and erotica

Beauty, Silence, Joy

“You can include me, too." William blew Olivia a kiss, and her cheeks heated with a blush. "No need to say anything. I already know what words are perched on your tongue. Stop me if I'm wrong, but my getting to know you will be your pleasure.”

Gena Showalter (1975) American writer

Source: The Darkest Passion

Kiss

“Anticipating pain was like enduring it twice. Why not anticipate pleasure instead?”

Robin Hobb book Renegade's Magic

Source: Renegade's Magic

Pain

“It is not sex that gives the pleasure, but the lover.”

Marge Piercy (1936) American novelist and poet

Sex, Lovers

“Pleasure is never as pleasant as we expected it to be and pain is always more painful. The pain in the world always outweighs the pleasure. If you don't believe it, compare the respective feelings of two animals, one of which is eating the other.”

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) German philosopher

Pain, World, Feeling, Animals

“To be angry once in a while is really good fun, because it makes others so miserable. But to be angry morning, noon and night, as I am, grows monotonous and prevents my gaining any other pleasure in life.”

L. Frank Baum book The Emerald City of Oz

Source: The Emerald City of Oz

Life, Night

“Most people seem to take pleasure in feeling superior to someone. I'm not like that, which pleases me because it makes me feel superior.”

Steven Brust book Jhegaala

Source: Jhegaala

People, Feeling

“I have neither curiosity, interest, pain nor pleasure, in anything, good or evil, they can say of me. I feel only a slight disgust, and a sort of wonder that they presume to write my name.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) English Romantic poet

Pain, Feeling, Evil

“Try to find pleasure in the speed that you're not used to. Changing the way you do routine things allows a new person to grow inside of you. But when all is said and done, you're the one who must decide how you handle it.”

Paulo Coelho (1947) Brazilian lyricist and novelist

Way, Change, Personality, Speed

“The small hopes and plans and pleasures of children should be tenderly respected by grown-up people, and never rudely thwarted or ridiculed.”

Louisa May Alcott book Little Men

Source: Little Men

Children, People, Hope

“The happiness of life is made up of minute fractions — the little soon forgotten charities of a kiss or smile, a kind look, a heartfelt compliment, and the countless infinitesimals of pleasurable and genial feeling.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) English poet, literary critic and philosopher

"The Friend. The Improvisatore" (1828)

Life, Happiness, Smile, Feeling

“On with the dance! let joy be unconfin'd;
No sleep till morn, when Youth and Pleasure meet
To chase the Glowing Hours with Flying feet.”

George Gordon Byron Childe Harold's Pilgrimage

Source: Childe Harold's Pilgrimage

Youth, Sleep, Joy, Dance

“The pleasure isn't in owning the person. The pleasure is this. Having another contender in the room with you.”

Philip Roth book The Human Stain

Source: The Human Stain

Personality

“If you were Queen of pleasure
And I were King of pain
We'd hunt down Love together,
Pluck out his flying-feather,
And teach his feet a measure,
And find his mouth a rein;
If you were Queen of pleasure
And I were King of pain.”

Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837–1909) English poet, playwright, novelist, and critic

Love, Pain, Flying

“Later she remembered all the hours of the afternoon as happy -- one of those uneventful times that seem at the moment only a link between past and future pleasure, but turn out to have been the pleasure itself.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) American novelist and screenwriter

Source: Tender is the Night

Happiness, Time, Past, Future

“Perhaps the rare and simple pleasure of being seen for what one is compensates for the misery of being it.”

Margaret Drabble book A Summer Bird-Cage

A Summer Bird-Cage (1963; New York: William Morrow, 1964) p. 120

“a man doesn't prove he's a man by getting an erection. He's only a real man if he can pleasure a woman. And if he can pleasure a prostitute, he'll think he's the best lover on the block" -Nyah”

Paulo Coelho book Eleven Minutes

Source: Eleven Minutes

Lovers, Thinking

“School made us 'literate' but did not teach us to read for pleasure.”

Ambeth R. Ocampo (1961) Filipino historian

School, Reading

“This was what people fought wars over, she thought, and killed each other over, and destroyed their lives for: this nerve-shredding mixture of longing and pleasure.”

Cassandra Clare book Lady Midnight

Source: Lady Midnight

War, People

“The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel must be intolerably stupid”

Jane Austen book Northanger Abbey

Variant: The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel must be intolerably stupid
Source: "Northanger Abbey" (1817)

Stupidity, Personality

“What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure.”

Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) English writer

First attributed to Johnson 15 years posthumously in a footnote in William Seward's Biographiana (1799), but written in slightly different form in 1764, in a profile in The Scots Magazine of Charles Churchill. The Scots Magazine, Volume 26 https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=y14AAAAAYAAJ&q=%22without+effort%22&redir_esc=y&hl=en#v=snippet&q=%22without%20effort%22&f=false <br class="br"> Quote Investigator http://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/11/08/without-effort/, retrieved 17 May 2016 <br class="br">Misattributed <br class="br">Source: Johnsonian Miscellanies - Vol II

Effort, Reading

“And have you never known the pleasure and triumph of a lucky guess? I pity you. I thought you cleverer; for depend upon it, a lucky guess is never merely luck. There is always some talent in it.”

Jane Austen book Emma

Source: Emma

Dependency

“One reads for pleasure… it is not a public duty.”

Alan Bennett book The Uncommon Reader

Source: The Uncommon Reader

Reading

“For her, reading was directly linked to pleasure, not to knowledge or enigmas or constructions or verbal labyrinths…”

Roberto Bolaño book 2666

Source: 2666

Knowledge, Reading

“Book lovers will understand me,
and they will know too that part of the pleasure
of a library lies in its very existence.”

Jan Morris (1926) British historian

Books, Lovers, Understanding, Parting

“… what will we someday do, I always wonder, without the pleasures of turning through books and stumbling on things we never meant to find?”

Elizabeth Kostova book The Swan Thieves

Source: The Swan Thieves

Books

“Reading is awesome and flexible and fits around chores and earning money and building the future and whatever else I’m doing that day. My attitude towards reading is entirely Epicurean—reading is pleasure and I pursue it purely because I like it.”

Jo Walton (1964) Welsh Canadian writer

Money, Reading, Future

“They say anticipation makes pleasure more intense.”

Iris Johansen (1938) Novelist

Source: Quicksand

“When I was supposed to be awake, I was asleep. When I was supposed to sleep, I was silent. When a pleasure offered itself to me, I avoided it.”

Susanna Kaysen book Girl, Interrupted

Source: Girl, Interrupted

Sleep

“Irresponsibility is part of the pleasure of all art; it is the part the schools cannot recognize.”

Pauline Kael book Going Steady

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

School, Art, Parting

“Welcome home, Rachel mariana Morgan, he said, his goat-slitted eyes holding a new, dangerous light. It's a pleasure to finally meet you.”

Kim Harrison (1966) Pseudonym

Source: Pale Demon

Home, Light

“Enjoy the present, bid defiance to the future, laugh at all those reasonable beings who exercise their reason to avoid the misfortunes which they fear, destroying at the same time the pleasure that they might enjoy.”

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

Fear, Exercises, Time, Future

“In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) English poet, literary critic and philosopher

Kubla Khan (1797 or 1798)
Source: The Complete Poems

Sea

“Then the writing became so fluid that I sometimes felt as if I were writing for the sheer pleasure of telling a story, which may be the human condition that most resembles levitation.”

Gabriel García Márquez (1927–2014) Colombian writer

“Remember the botched brothel-visit in L’Education sentimentale and remember its lesson. Do not participate: happiness lies in the imagination, not the act. Pleasure is found first in anticipation, later in memory.”

Julian Barnes book Flaubert's Parrot

Source: Flaubert's Parrot

Happiness, Imagination, Memory

“What is one person's pleasure is another's poison….”

Cassandra Clare book Clockwork Prince

Source: Clockwork Prince

Personality

“I have coveted everything and taken pleasure in nothing”

Guy De Maupassant (1850–1893) French writer

“My definition of good literature is that which can be read by an educated reader, and reread with increased pleasure.”

Gene Wolfe (1931–2019) American science fiction and fantasy writer

Education, Literature, Reading

“Book love, my friends, is your pass to the greatest, the purest, and the most perfect pleasure that God has prepared for His creatures.”

Anthony Trollope (1815–1882) English novelist (1815-1882)

Speech at the opening of an art exhibition at Bolton Mechanics' Institution (7 December 1868)

Love, God, Books, Perfection

“She’d already decided to be with him. If only to wipe him from her mind, get him out of her system and
stop the fantasies plaguing her. If only to prove to herself that being with him would not be pleasurable for
her.”

Gena Showalter (1975) American writer

Source: The Darkest Pleasure

“He can kill anything for need but he could not even hurt a feeling for pleasure.”

John Steinbeck book Cannery Row

Source: Cannery Row

Feeling, Hurt

“Freedom has a high price, as high as that of slavery; the only difference is that you pay with pleasure and a smile, even when that smile is dimmed with tears.”

Paulo Coelho book The Zahir

Source: The Zahir

Smile, Tear, Freedom

“My dreams were all my own; I accounted for them to nobody; they were my refuge when annoyed — my dearest pleasure when free.”

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797–1851) English novelist, short story writer, dramatist, essayist, biographer, and travel writer

Introduction http://www.rc.umd.edu/editions/frankenstein/1831v1/intro.html to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein

Dreams

“One of the secrets, and pleasures, of cooking is to learn to correct something if it goes awry; and one of the lessons is to grin and bear it if it cannot be fixed.”

Julia Child My Life in France

Source: My Life in France

Secret, Learning, Cooking

“I merely say that all reading for pleasure is escape, whether it be Greek, mathematics, astronomy, Benedetto Croce, or The Diary of the Forgotten Man. To say otherwise is to be an intellectual snob, and a juvenile at the art of living.”

Raymond Chandler book The Simple Art of Murder

Source: The Simple Art of Murder

Art, Mathematics, Reading

“Every moment has its pleasures and its hope.”

Jane Austen book Mansfield Park

Source: Mansfield Park

Hope, Hope

“It isn't the big pleasures that count the most; it's making a great deal out of the little ones.”

Jean Webster (1876–1916) American novelist

“I used to think of my body as an instrument, of pleasure, or a means of transportation, or an implement for the accomplishment of my will.”

Margaret Atwood book The Handmaid's Tale

Source: The Handmaid's Tale

Thinking

“There are women who inspire you with the desire to conquer them and to take your pleasure of them; but this one fills you only with the desire to die slowly beneath her gaze.”

Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) French poet

Women

“As we grow older and realize more clearly the limitations of human happiness, we come to see that the only real and abiding pleasure in life is to give pleasure to other people.”

P.G. Wodehouse book Something Fresh

Source: Something Fresh

Life, Happiness, People

“… when pain is over, the remembrance of it often becomes a pleasure.”

Jane Austen book Persuasion

Source: Persuasion

Pain, Sad, Hurtful

“There is a Dutch word, uitwaaien, “to walk against the wind for pleasure.”

Elizabeth Gilbert (1969) American writer

Source: The Signature of All Things

“Alone at last. Oh, the pleasure of the pain. (Zarek)
You really do suffer from insanity, don’t you? (Thanatos)
Hardly. I have to say I enjoy every minute of it. (Zarek)”

Sherrilyn Kenyon book Dance with the Devil

Source: Dance with the Devil

Pain, Suffering

“Smiling with pleasure, they went through their memories, not sad, old people's memories, but poetic, youthful ones, those impressions from the very distant past where dream merges with reality, and they laughed softly, rejoicing at something.”

Leo Tolstoy book War and Peace

Source: War and Peace

People, Youth, Sadness, Smile

“I set out to discover the why of it, and to transform my pleasure into knowledge.”

Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) French poet

Knowledge

“Human beings suffer agonies, and their sad fates become legends; poets write verses about them and playwrights compose dramas, and the remembrance of past grief becomes a source of present pleasure - such is the strange alchemy of the spirit.”

Upton Sinclair book Dragon's Teeth

Source: Dragon's Teeth

Fate, Sadness, Suffering, Past

“I enjoyed the innocence of unhappiness and of helplessness; could I blame myself for a sin which attracted me, which flooded me with pleasure precisely to the extent it brought me to despair?”

Georges Bataille (1897–1962) French intellectual and literary figure

Source: My Mother/Madame Edwarda/The Dead Man

Despair

“The real things haven't changed. It is still best to be honest and truthful; to make the most of what we have; to be happy with simple pleasures; and have courage when things go wrong.”

Laura Ingalls Wilder (1867–1957) American children's writer, diarist, and journalist

Letter to children (February 1947) http://www.liwfrontiergirl.com/letter.html <br class="br">Context: The Little House books are stories of long ago. The way we live and your schools are much different now, so many changes have made living and learning easier. But the real things haven't changed. It is still best to be honest and truthful; to make the most of what we have; to be happy with simple pleasures and to be cheerful and have courage when things go wrong.

Happiness, Truth, Courage, Change

“Grace is the pleasure of God to magnify the worth of God by giving sinners the right and power to delight in God without obscuring the glory of God.”

John Piper (1946) American writer

God

“Sleep is perhaps the only among life's great pleasures which need not be of short duration.”

Roger Zelazny Knight of Shadows

Source: Knight of Shadows

Life, Sleep

“She let him know how much she liked what he was doing by scoring his back with her nails and crying out with pleasure.
"Oh, God."
"Nay, lass. Connor.”

Julie Garwood (1946) American writer

Source: The Wedding

God, Cry

“Reading has always been the largest and most irreplaceable pleasure for Vincent; reading about other people's successes and failures, joys and sufferings seemed to bury his own failures.”

Irving Stone book Lust for Life

Source: Lust for Life

People, Failure, Suffering, Reading

“Come live with me and be my Love,
And we will all the pleasures prove”

Christopher Marlowe (1564–1593) English dramatist, poet and translator

Source: The Complete Plays and Poems

Love, Romantic, For Him, For Boyfriend

“Sometimes it is harder to deprive oneself of a pain than of a pleasure.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) American novelist and screenwriter

Quoted, Tender is the Night (1934)

Pain

“… and the Universe,… will explode later for your pleasure.”

Douglas Adams book The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

Source: The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

Universe

“Life is essentially a cheat and its conditions are those of defeat; the redeeming things are not happiness and pleasure but the deeper satisfactions that come out of struggle.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) American novelist and screenwriter

Life, Happiness, Cheating

“Sometimes the small pleasures in life are the sweetest.”

Karen Marie Moning (1964) author

Source: Bloodfever

Life

“Then my heart with pleasure fills
And dances with the daffodils.”

William Wordsworth (1770–1850) English Romantic poet

Heart, Dance

“For a well-made cup of coffee is the proper beginning to an idle day. Its aroma is beguiling, its taste is sweet; yet it leaves behind only bitterness and regret. In that, it resembles, surely, the pleasures of love.”

Anthony Capella (1962) British writer

Source: The Various Flavours Of Coffee

Love, Coffee

“He could not construct for the child's pleasure the world he'd lost without constructing the loss as well and he thought perhaps the child had known this better than he.”

Cormac McCarthy book The Road

Source: The Road

World, Loss

“I am absolutely convinced that meaninglessness does not come form being weary of pain; meaninglessness comes from being weary of pleasure.”

Ravi Zacharias (1946) Indian philosopher

Source: Can Man Live Without God

Pain

“Sometimes it is harder to deprive oneself of a pain than of a pleasure and the memory so possessed him that for the moment there was nothing to do but to pretend.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book Tender Is the Night

Source: Tender Is the Night

Pain, Memory

“The small things of life were often so much bigger than the great things, she decided, wondering how many writers and philosophers had said this before her, the trivial pleasures like cooking, one's home, little poems especially sad ones, solitary walks, funny things seen and overheard.”

Barbara Pym book Less than Angels

Less than Angels (1955), chapter 9

Life, Sadness, Home, Cooking

“I'll tell them that on bad mornings, it feels impossible to take pleasure in anything because I'm afraid it could be taken away.”

Suzanne Collins book Mockingjay

Katniss (p. 390; closing words of the epilogue)
Source: The Hunger Games trilogy, Mockingjay (2010)
Context: I'll tell them how I survive it. I'll tell them that on bad mornings, it feels impossible to take pleasure in anything because I'm afraid it could be taken away. That's when I make a list in my head of every act of goodness I've seen someone do. It's like a game. Repetitive. Even a little tedious after more than twenty years.
But there are much worse games to play.

Feeling

“There is no fundamental difference between man and animals in their ability to feel pleasure and pain, happiness, and misery.”

Charles Darwin (1809–1882) British naturalist, author of "On the origin of species, by means of natural selection"

Pain, Happiness, Feeling, Animals

“Existence is this, I thought, a start of joy, a stab of pain, an intense pleasure, veins that pulse under the skin, there is no other truth to tell.”

Elena Ferrante book The Days of Abandonment

Source: The Days of Abandonment

Pain, Truth, Joy

“Never resist a sentence you like, in which language takes its own pleasure and in which, after having abused it for so long, you are stupefied by its innocence.”

Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007) French sociologist and philosopher

Source: Cool Memories

“People derived too much pleasure from seeing their fellow man morally humiliated to spoil that pleasure by hearing out an explanation.”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being

People

“It's the sorrow you feel that allows you to crave love. Without the suffering, there would be no true pleasure. Without tears, no joy. Without deficiency, no longing. This is the secret of the human heart, Rom.”

Ted Dekker book Forbidden

Source: Forbidden

Love, Secret, Feeling, Tear

“And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time’s malleability.”

Julian Barnes book The Sense of an Ending

Source: The Sense of an Ending

Pain, Time

“The great pleasure of a dog is that you may make a fool of yourself with him and not only will he not scold you, but he will make a fool of himself too.”

Samuel Butler (1835–1902) novelist

Dogs
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part XIV - Higgledy-Piggledy

Dogs, Fools

“Laughter is more than just a pleasurable activity… When people laugh together, they tend to talk and touch more and to make eye contact more frequently.”

Gretchen Rubin (1966) American writer

Source: The Happiness Project: Or Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun

People, Laughter