Quotes About Pleasure

If you know your appetite will be sated, pleasure is more about the appetite than about the sating.

martinis, steak, and red wine, a proven formula for deep thinking

I read a sentence or two, wait for him to come up with his usual barrage of questions, answer them, then read another sentence or two. Classics read well this way. They must be written this way. Sometimes we have spent a whole evening reading and talking and discovered we have only covered two or three pages. It's a form of reading done a century ago.. when Chautauquas were popular. In less you've tried it you can't imagine how pleasant it is to do it this way.

Subjected to enough uncontrollable stress, we learn to be helpless—we lack the motivation to try to live because we assume the worst; we lack the cognitive clarity to perceive when things are actually going fine, and we feel an aching lack of pleasure in everything.

The defining feature of a major depression is loss of pleasure. If I had to define a major depression in a single sentence, I would describe it as a "genetic/neurochemical disorder requiring a strong environmental trigger whose characteristic manifestation is an inability to appreciate sunsets.

Thus there's dopaminergic activation during schadenfreude—gloating over an envied person's fall from grace.

Now we have hundreds of carefully engineered, designed, and marketed commercial foods filled with rapidly absorbed processed sugars that cause a burst of sensation that can't be matched by some lowly natural food. Once, we had lives that, amid considerable privation and negatives, also offered a huge array of subtle and often hard-won pleasures. And now we have drugs that cause spasms of pleasure and dopamine a thousand-fold higher than anything stimulated in our drug-free world.

the brain becomes literal when we do the flip side of empathy.10 It's painful watching a hated competitor succeed, and we activate the ACC at that time. Conversely, if he fails, we gloat, feel schadenfreude, get pleasure from his pain, and activate dopaminergic reward pathways. Forget "Your pain is my pain." Your pain is my gain.

An emptiness comes from this combination of over-the-top nonnatural sources of reward and the inevitability of habituation; this is because unnaturally strong explosions of synthetic experience and sensation and pleasure evoke unnaturally strong degrees of habituation.

What was an unexpected pleasure yesterday is what we feel entitled to today, and what won't be enough tomorrow.

So dopamine is more about anticipation of reward than about reward itself.

If lists are a guilty pleasure, then book lists are an almost sinful addiction

Before you came to live with us, our lives were as always, and we were happy. We worked, we ate, and then we slept. When you came we were glad, for you brought us many fine gifts. And every night, instead of going to sleep, we sat with you, drank coffee, and smoked your tobacco, and listened to your radio. But now you go, and we are sorry, for all of these things go with you. We now know pleasures to which we are unaccustomed, and we shall be unhappy.

And since the possession of qualities presupposes that one takes a certain pleasure in their reality, all this gives us a glimpse of how it may all of a sudden happen to someone who cannot summon up any sense of reality — even in relation to himself — that one day he appears to himself as a man without qualities.

ohne den Menschen etwas vorschreiben zu dürfen, würde die Moral gar kein Vergnügen bereiten.

Storytelling and copulation are the two chief forms of amusement in the South. They're inexpensive and easy to procure.

Yeah, I'm Governor, Jack, and the trouble with governors is they think they got to keep their dignity. But listen here, there ain't anything worth doing a man can do and keep his dignity. Can you figure out a single thing you really please-God like to do you can do and keep your dignity? The human frame just ain't built that way.

Lois looked edible, and you know it was tender all the way through, a kind of mystic combination of filet mignon and a Georgia peach aching for the tongue and ready to bleed gold.

What was an unexpected pleasure yesterday is what we feel entitled to today, and won't be enough tomorrow.

But the long pomp, the midnight masquerade, With all the freaks of wanton wealth array'd— In these, ere triflers half their wish obtain, The toiling pleasure sickens into pain; And, e'en while fashion's brightest arts decoy, The heart distrusting asks if this be joy.

Life was meant to be enjoyed.

Oh, Marilla, looking forward to things is half the pleasure of them," exclaimed Anne. "You mayn't get the things themselves; but nothing can prevent you from having the fun of looking forward to them. Mrs. Lynde says, 'Blessed are they who expect nothing for they shall not be disappointed.' But I think it would be worse to expect nothing than to be disappointed."...

The world looks like something God had just imaged for his own pleasure, doesn't it?

Oh Marilla, looking forward to things is half the pleasure of them, exclaimed Anne.