Whoever did not live in the years neighboring 1789 does not know what the pleasure of living means.

Most people have never learned that one of the main aims in life is to enjoy it.

For the unlearned man knows not what it is to descend into himself, or to call himself to account, nor the pleasure of that suavissima vita, indies sentire se fieri meliorem.

They've got no idea what happiness is, they don't know that without this love there is no happiness or unhappiness for us — there is no life.

He who has not spent hours, days, or years with someone he loves cannot know what happiness is, for he is unable to imagine a protracted miracle like this - one which makes out of ordinary sights and events the most enchanted existence.

It is not pleasure that makes life worth living. It is life that makes pleasure worth having.

Pleasure in itself cannot give our existence meaning; thus the lack of pleasure cannot take away meaning from life,

He had never learned to live without delight. And he would have to learn to, just as, in a Prohibition country, he supposed he would have to learn to live without sherry. Theoretically he knew that life is possible, maybe even pleasant, without joy, without passionate griefs. But it had never occurred to him that he might have to live like that.

I cannot suppose there is anybody here who would think it either a good life, or an amusing one, to sit with one's hands before one doing nothing - to live like a gentleman, as fools call it.

why is it that the people who know how to enjoy themselves never have any money and the people who have money never know how to enjoy themselves?

Happiness does not lie in amusement; it would be strange if one were to take trouble and suffer hardship all one's life in order to amuse oneself

to not understand neocolonialism is to not fully live in the present.

There is only one pleasure—that of being alive. All the rest is misery.

Do not enjoy yourself. Enjoy dances and theaters and joy-rides and champagne and oysters; enjoy jazz and cocktails and night-clubs if you can enjoy nothing better; enjoy bigamy and burglary and any crime in the calendar, in preference to the other alternative; but never learn to enjoy yourself.