140 Quotes Tagged: pleasure

none are left to please when none are left to love.

Opium! dread agent of unimaginable pleasure and pain! I had heard of it as I had of manna or of ambrosia, but no further. How unmeaning a sound was it at that time: what solemn chords does it now strike upon my heart! What heart-quaking vibrations of sad and happy remembrances!

It is clear that men accept an immediate pain rather than an immediate pleasure, but only because they expect a greater pleasure in the future. Often the pleasure is illusory, but their error in calculation is no refutation of the rule. You are puzzled because you cannot get over the idea that pleasures are only of the sense; but, child, a man who dies for his country dies because he likes it as surely as a man eats pickled cabbage because he likes it.

The art of living has no history: it does not evolve: the pleasure which vanishes vanishes for good, there is no substitute for it. Other pleasures come, which replace nothing. No progress in pleasures, nothing but mutations.

Which wills, that as the thing more perfect is,
The more it feels of pleasure and of pain

It is double pleasure to deceive the deceiver.

It was not evil that gave her the idea of pleasure, that seemed to her attractive; it was pleasure, rather, that seemed evil.

Birth is painful and delightful. Death is painful and delightful. Everything that ends is also the beginning of something else. Pain is not a punishment; pleasure is not a reward.

Give them pleasure. The same pleasure they have when they wake up from a nightmare.

The thing about being misunderstood is that it diminishes your enjoyment of life

Reading is perhaps the greatest pleasure you will have in life; the one you will think of longest, and repent of least.

Lectio, quae placuit, decies repetita placebit.

(What we read with pleasure we can read many times with pleasure.)

Sorrow, terror, anguish, despair itself are often the chosen expressions of an approximation to the highest good. Our sympathy in tragic fiction depends on this principle; tragedy delights by affording a shadow of the pleasure which exists in pain. This is the source also of the melancholy which is inseparable from the sweetest melody. The pleasure that is in sorrow is sweeter than the pleasure of pleasure itself.

The greatest pleasure is not - say - sex or geometry. It is just understanding. And if you can get people to understand their own humanity - well, that's the job of the writer.

This appetite to choose death by pleasure if it is available to choose - this appetite of your people unable to choose appetites, this is the death.