Quotes About Pleasure

wouldn't it be a positive experience for me if these things come to pass and a negative one if they don't? Well, yes: part of what it means to want something is that you are pleased when it happens. But this isn't an argument for hedonism, because it doesn't show that the pleasure is the goal itself, as opposed to a by-product.

the most common pleasures involve experiences that don't really exist, as when we read novels, go to movies, play video games, and daydream. They are pleasures of the imagination. This is how we spend most of our time—Netflix without the chill.

Pain can be good. The picture we presented earlier, of a scale from 0 to 10, is wrong. Perhaps other creatures work this way, with pain and pleasure on a single continuum. But for people, something can be both a 0 and a 10. Negative experiences and positive experiences—pain and pleasure—are not opposites; thinking of them like low temperatures and high temperatures is a mistake.

benign masochism refers to the choice to pursue activities that are normally painful or unpleasant but not harmful.

trials they were asked, "How happy are you right now?" The main predictor of reported short-term happiness wasn't how much the subjects were making; it was how much they were making relative to their expectations. Momentary pleasure and pain are, at least in part, relative experiences.

It turns out, then, that if you think something is really going to hurt and it hurts just mildly, the magic of contrast can cause this mild hurt to transform into pleasure.

Choosing to experience pain to enhance subsequent pleasure is a powerful trick, but it only works some of the time.

My friend Graeme Wood, a journalist who has written extensively about ISIS, including a book based on interviews with both new recruits and long-standing members, tells me that many of those who joined the group were jaded when they signed up. They've had a lot of anonymous sex, they've taken every drug there is, they've lived lives of empty pleasure. But this wasn't enough. They were looking for more, something of real value.

We will often choose to do something rather than nothing, even if the something is effortful and provides no tangible benefits. Effort itself can be a source of pleasure.

Intelligence is nothing without delight.

You are free to ask for and choose what you enjoy and what brings you pleasure, as long as those choices are beneficial and in line with God's Word, and you have listened respectfully to and considered prayerfully what others need (not to be mistaken with what others usually want). This applies at work, play, home, church, in the bedroom, etc.

I am still tempted to assess the "good" of a day by whether it pleased me versus whether I pleased God and was loving toward others.

Only when the greatest pleasure in your life is the knowledge that God is pleased by the way you are living can you handle pleasure properly.

Because we live for our happiness, happiness always eludes us—???because every fulfilled desire is followed by yet another desire.

Decisions about relationships, like all other decisions in life, should be based on their consequences for experiences of pleasure and purpose over time, and not by narratives surrounding them.

Ultimately, we should all be seeking to use our time in ways that bring us the greatest overall pleasure and purpose for as long as possible. Just as you cannot recover time that is lost, you cannot recover happiness that is lost. Staying in a boring job or an annoying relationship simply prolongs the misery and any future happiness is unlikely to fully compensate for this loss. Lost happiness is lost forever.

So experiences of pleasure and purpose are all that matter in the end. Hedonism is the school of thought that holds that pleasure is the only thing that matters in the end. By adding sentiments of purpose to pleasure, I define my position as sentimental hedonism. I am a sentimental hedonist and I think that, deep down, we all are.

To be truly happy, then, you need to feel both pleasure and purpose. You can be just as happy or sad as I am but with very different combinations of pleasure and purpose. And you may require each to different degrees at different times. But you do need to feel both. I call this the pleasure-purpose principle—the PPP.

Day to day, moment to moment, you feel sentiments of pleasure, purpose, pain, and pointlessness.

My research and my experiences tell me that life is less about trading off happiness now for happiness later (and vice versa) and more about trading off pleasure and purpose at different rates at different times.

Take a second to recall your last holiday. How much did you enjoy it? Would you go back again? If you are anything like other people, two factors will explain your answers: the peak moment of pleasure or pain and the final moment of pleasure or pain. This is known as the peak-end effect.50 Further, your overall assessment of an experience doesn't even pay that much attention to how long it lasted. This is known as duration neglect.

My ability to keep weight training—my "stickability"—is simply sticking with an activity that brings happiness in the current moment, rather than in the future. It's the pleasure-purpose feedback you get while you are engaged in an activity that matters most.

I'll show that the key to happiness is finding pleasure and purpose in everyday life.

In my definition, a sentiment is a feeling that covers the kinds of emotional pleasures and pains that psychologists generally have in mind but it additionally includes feelings about the degree to which an experience is purposeful.