Quotes About Pleasure

Too much of a good thing can be wonderful," said West, who was talking about sex, not vitamins.) Second,

Reading was my escape and my comfort, my consolation, my stimulant of choice: reading for the pure pleasure of it, for the beautiful stillness that surrounds you when you hear an author's words reverberating in your head.

And that's finally all anyone wants out of a book- to be amused

People pushed by force of habit, pushed for the pure pleasure of pushing, and they would go on pushing until you showed them you were willing to push back, at which point you would earn their respect.

Quand on me demande pourquoi je fume, je réponds que c'est parce que j'aime tousser.

Leer por puro placer, por la hermosa quietud que te envuelve cuando resuenan en la cabeza las palabras de un autor.

Of all the interpretations I've considered over the years, this is the one I like best. That doesn't mean it's true, but as long as it could be true, it pleases me to think it is.

Such was life in France. People pushed by force of habit, pushed for the pure pleasure of pushing, and they would go on pushing until you showed them you were willing to push back, at which point you would earn their respect.

whenever someone asks him why he smokes, he inevitably answers: "Because I like to cough.

Think of the satisfaction [...] of crawling into bed and knowing that your dreams are about to take place on top of nineteenth-century American literature. Imagine the pleasure of sitting down to a meal with the entire Renaissance lurking below your food. In point of fact, I had no idea which books were in which boxes, but I was a great one for making up stories back then, and I liked the sound of those sentences, even if they were false.

No es que escribir me produzca un gran placer, pero es mucho peor si no lo hago.

A steady fuck is good for you.

They say a cigarette takes three minutes off your life, but good hashish makes dying seem so far away.

Some very common foods and drinks are aversive. Few people enjoy, at first, coffee, beer, tobacco, or chili pepper. Pleasure from pain is uniquely human. No other animal willingly eats such foods when there are alternatives. Philosophers have often looked for the defining feature of humans—language, rationality, culture, and so on. I'd stick with this: Man is the only animal that likes Tabasco sauce.

If you suffer for something that gives delight, soon the suffering itself can give joy.

The circumstances in which you get pleasure from pain are going to be rare. And this makes sense. As both Bentham and Darwin knew well, the hurt of pain is there to get us to stop doing certain things.

If God exists, maybe He can simultaneously feel the pain and pleasure of every sentient being. But for us mortals, empathy really is a spotlight. It's a spotlight that has a narrow focus, one that shines most brightly on those we love and gets dim for those who are strange or different or frightening.

Sub-goals, some indication of progress. Part of the pleasure of a crossword puzzle is the feeling of progress as you get closer to completion, bit by bit, through the meeting of small goals. This is what much of gamification is about: using points or currency or badges or progress bars to indicate that you're getting closer to the end;

In a lovely paper called "Suspense in the Absence of Uncertainty," Richard Gerrig points out that suspense can be created even if one knows the outcome—the election of George Washington as president, say, or the successful creation of the atomic bomb by the United States in World War II—so long as there is uncertainty about how the obstacles are dealt with. It is this surmounting of obstacles that can pull us in; they're what give the opportunity of pleasure.

And so, for benign masochism to work, certain conditions must be met. The pain has to be relatively brief. It has to quickly fade, providing the space for pleasurable contrast. And the damage cannot be severe.

There can be praise and exultation and even awe for the hero, as well as the vicarious pleasure of imagining oneself in the hero's role. It's interesting, though, that this seems to be a milder pleasure than comeuppance, perhaps because there isn't the same evolutionary need for us to scrutinize and praise and take delight in goodness as there is for us to focus on the bad.

Most relevant for the purposes here, one lucky accident of this feature of memory is that pain-then-pleasure is recalled as better than pleasure-then-pain. Because of this, even if the amount of pain, taken in isolation, is the same as the amount of pleasure, if the pain comes first, the distortions of memory decrease the pain and increase the pleasure, improving the whole experience.

chosen suffering can generate and enhance pleasure, and that it is an essential part of meaningful activities and a meaningful life. And it's often the right thing to do. I'll repeat the quote from Zadie Smith: "It hurts just as much as it is worth." Sometimes pain is a proper acknowledgment of value.

Let's go back to the question of what people want and consider an answer that, whatever else one might say about it, is at least pretty clear. It's pleasure. The Greek term for pleasure is h?don?, which is why those who argue for the centrality of pleasure are called hedonists.