Quotes About Pleasure

Again, it is harder to fight with pleasure than with anger, to use Heraclitus' phrase', but both art and virtue are always concerned with what is harder;

So more friends than suffice for one's own life are superfluous, and a hindrance to noble loving; there is therefore no need of them. In the case of friends for pleasure, too, a few are enough, as a little seasoning in food is enough. (page 177)

to be learning something is the greatest of pleasures of mankind, however small their capacity for it; the reason of the delight in seeing the picture is that one is at the same time as learning— gathering the meaning of things

If the pleasure is immediate and the pain distant, or if the profit is immediate and the punishment distant. This is the kind of thing that moves weak-willed people, and there is no human impulse that is not liable to moral weakness.

Moreover, since, in general, all those things which delight us when present usually do so also when we anticipate them or remember them, then even anger is pleasant, as Homer said in describing it as 'sweeter by far than trickling honey'.* After all, people do not feel anger for those they think beyond the reach of retaliation, nor do they feel anger (or relatively little) for those who have far more power than them.

And retaliation too is pleasant, because if failing at it is painful, succeeding at it is pleasant.

to learn gives the liveliest pleasure, not only to philosophers but to men in general

É também prazeroso o que não é resultado da coação, porquanto esta se opõe à natureza. Consequentemente, aquilo que é ditado pela força da necessidade é doloroso, e daí o dito tão acertado: Tudo o que se faz por força da necessidade é amargo.

Once more; it is harder, as Heraclitus says, to fight against pleasure than against anger:

For moral excellence is concerned with pleasures and pains; it is on account of pleasure that we do bad things, and on account of pain that we abstain from noble ones. Hence we ought to have been brought up in a particular way from our very youth, as Plato says, so as both to delight in and to be pained by the things that we ought; for this is the right education.

to be learning something is the greatest of pleasures not only to the philosopher but also to the rest of mankind, however small their capacity for it; the reason of the delight in seeing the picture is that one is at the same time learning--gathering the meaning of things...

Even if our contact with eternal beings is slight, none the less because of its surpassing value this knowledge is a greater pleasure than our knowledge of everything around us.

Again, men of the melancholic temperament constantly need some remedial process (because the body, from its temperament, is constantly being worried), and they are in a chronic state of violent desire. But Pleasure drives out Pain; not only such Pleasure as is directly contrary to Pain but even any Pleasure provided it be strong: and this is how men come to be utterly destitute of Self-Mastery, i.e. low and bad.

Again he urged that that is most choiceworthy which we choose, not by reason of, or with a view to, anything further; and that Pleasure is confessedly of this kind because no one ever goes on to ask to what purpose he is pleased, feeling that Pleasure is in itself choiceworthy. Again, that when added to any other good it makes it more choiceworthy; as, for instance, to actions of justice, or perfected self-mastery; and good can only be increased by itself.

For the Principles of the matters of moral action are the final cause of them: now to the man who has been corrupted by reason of pleasure or pain the Principle immediately becomes obscured, nor does he see that it is his duty to choose and act in each instance with a view to this final cause and by reason of it: for viciousness has a tendency to destroy the moral Principle: and so Practical Wisdom must be a state conjoined with reason, true, having human good for its object, and apt to do.

To be learning something new is ever the chief pleasure of mankind .

In general, then, pleasure is not good, because every pleasure is a perceptible process of coming into its nature; but no coming-into-being belongs to the same class as the ends we pursue—for

I have always preferred an occasional orgy to a nightly routine. What? Aunt Augusta said that. In Travels with My Aunt.

A half-hour conversation with Binky was like eating a Whitman Sampler in one sitting.

Imaginative poetry produces a far greater mental strain than novels. It produces probably the severest strain of any form of literature. It is the highest form of literature. It yields the highest form of pleasure, and teaches the highest form of wisdom. In a word, there is nothing to compare with it. I say this with sad consciousness of the fact that the majority of people do not read poetry.

A sandwich and a cup of coffee, and then off to violin-land, where all is sweetness and delicacy and harmony.

To the man who loves art for its own sake, it is frequently in its least important and lowliest manifestations that the keenest pleasure is to be derived.

You have brought detection as near an exact science as it ever will be brought in this world." My companion flushed up with pleasure at my words, and the earnest way in which I uttered them. I had already observed that he was as sensitive to flattery on the score of his art as any girl could be of her beauty.

He had never said as much before, and I must admit that his words gave me keen pleasure, for I had often been piqued by his indifference to my admiration and to the attempts which I had made to give publicity to his methods. I was proud, too, to think that I had so far mastered his system as to apply it in a way which earned his approval.