Pleasure Quotes - Page 23

• Good conversation can leave you more exhilarated than alcohol; more refreshed than the theater or a concert. It can bring you entertainment and pleasure; it can help you get ahead, solve problems, spark the imagination of others. It can increase your knowledge and education. It can erase misunderstandings, and bring you closer to those you love.

  Dorothy Sarnoff

  Imagination, Alcohol, Sparks

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• Men cannot labor on always. They must have intervals of relaxation. They cannot sleep through these intervals. What are they to do? Why, if they do not work or sleep, they must have recreation. And if they have not recreation from healthful sources, they will be very likely to take it from the poisoned fountains of intemperance. Or, if they have pleasures, which, though innocent, are forbidden by the maxims of public morality, their very pleasures are liable to become poisoned fountains.

  Orville Dewey

  Sleep, Men, Relaxation

  7 Copy quote

• [On the United States:] We are a wildly energetic people in our pursuit of pleasure, let alone in our pursuit of money, and we are very odd to look at as we go about our lives.

  Martha Gellhorn

  People, United States, Looks

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• Since I have known God in a saving manner, painting, poetry, and music have had charms unknown to me before. I have received what I suppose is a taste for them, or religion has refined my mind and made it susceptible of impressions from the sublime and beautiful. O, how religion secures the heightened enjoyment of those pleasures which keep so many from God, by their becoming a source of pride!

  Henry Martyn

  Beautiful, Art, Pride

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• I am tired to death! tired of every thing! I would give the universe for a disposition less difficult to please. Yet, after all, what is there to give pleasure? When one has seen one thing, one has seen every thing.

  Fanny Burney

  Tired, Boredom, Giving

  Frances Burney, Fanny Burney (2015). “Complete Works of Frances Burney (Delphi Classics)”, p.653, Delphi Classics

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• We relate all our afflictions more frequently than we do our pleasures.

  Fanny Burney

  Complaining, Affliction, Relate

  Frances Burney, Fanny Burney (2015). “Complete Works of Frances Burney (Delphi Classics)”, p.3859, Delphi Classics

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• Pleasure is a sensation. It is written into our bodies; it is our experience of delight, of joy. ... Pleasure will become a marker, a compass pointing to emotional true north.

  Carol Gilligan

  Emotional, Joy, Delight

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• Our sages of blessed memory have said that we must not enjoy any pleasure in this world without reciting a blessing. If we eat any food, or drink any beverage, we must recite a blessing over them before and after. If we breathe the scent of goodly grass, the fragrance of spices, the aroma of good fruits, we pronounce a blessing over the pleasure. The same applies to pleasures of the sight. And the same applies to pleasures of the ear.

  Shmuel Yosef Agnon

  Memories, Blessed, Blessing

  11 Copy quote

• Regardless of how often the appetite for entertainment violence becomes addictive, increased exposure does risk further desensitizing viewers. And the element of pleasure that they derive may lead them to regard violence as a more acceptable way of dealing with problems, and victimization as more tolerable so long as it befalls others, not themselves.

  Sissela Bok

  Long, Risk, Doe

  4 Copy quote

• Civilization, that great fraud of our times, has promised man that by complicating his existence it would multiply his pleasures. ... Civilization has promised man freedom, at the cost of giving up everything dear to him, which it arrogantly treated as lies and fantasies. ... Hour by hour needs increase and are nearly always unsatisfied, peopling the earth with discontented rebels. The superfluous has become a necessity and luxuries indispensable.

  Isabelle Eberhardt

  Giving Up, Lying, Men

  24 Copy quote

• The final moment of success is often no more thrilling than taking off a heavy backpack at the end of a long hike. If you went on the hike only to feel that pleasure, you are a fool. Yet people sometimes do just this. They work hard at a task and expect some special euphoria at the end. But when they achieve success and find only moderate and short-lived pleasure, they ask is that all there is? They devalue their accomplishments as a striving after wind. We can call this the progress principle: Pleasure comes more from making progress toward goals than from achieving them.

  Jonathan Haidt

  Happiness, Hard Work, Wind

  26 Copy quote

• Gardening is peaceful, yet there is a great element of failure. It's the perfect metaphor for life -- a lot of pleasure, then it's over. There's great satisfaction in tending something, feeling it needs you, even if it's just a plant on your windowsill.

  Jane Kaczmarek

  Perfect, Peaceful, Feelings

  5 Copy quote

• Despite our complicated civilization, so called, or perhaps on account of it, we are all of us a mere set of barbarians, who find it less trouble to provide a new, cheap, and shoddy thing than to get the full use and full pleasure out of a finely-made and carefully-chosen old one.

  Vernon Lee

  Civilization, Barbarians, Use

  Vernon Lee (1904). “Hortus vitae : essays on the garden of life”

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• Novel writing is a kind of private pleasure, even if nothing comes of it in worldly terms.

  Barbara Pym

  Writing, Kind, Term

  4 Copy quote

• When a little pleasure has flashed for a moment against the dark, I have made that jewel mine. I have hundreds of them ... I call it my Necklace of Perfect Joy. When the world goes wrong, I have only to close my eyes and remember all the links in my chain, set with gems, some large and some small, but all beautiful with the beauty which never fades. It is all I can take with me when I go. My material possessions must stay behind, but my Necklace of Perfect Joy will bring me happiness to the end, when I put it on, to be nevermore unclasped.

  Myrtle Reed

  Beautiful, Eye, Dark

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• Not infrequently, when a man asks a woman to marry him, he means that he wants her to help him love himself, and if, blinded by her own feeling, she takes him for her captain, her pleasure craft becomes a pirate ship, the colours change to a black flag with a sinister sign, and her inevitable destiny is the coral reef.

  Myrtle Reed

  Mean, Destiny, Men

  Myrtle Reed, Mary Badollet Powell (1911). “The Myrtle Reed Year Book: Epigrams and Opinions from the Writings and Sayings of Myrtle Reed”

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• If you don't read for pleasure, you'll lose your edge as a writer.

  Nora Roberts

  Ifs, Edges, Loses

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• where I have seen good I shall speak of it with pleasure, and where I have seen the reverse, I shall try to be silent; for a book is meant to give pleasure, and pain that is inflicted in black and white lasts for ever.

  Isabel Burton

  Pain, Book, Black And White

  Lady Isabel Burton (1875). “The Inner Life of Syria, Palestine, and the Holy Land: From My Private Journal”, p.3

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• No pleasure or success in life quite meets the capacity of our hearts. We take in our good things with enthusiasm, and think ourselves happy and satisfied; but afterward, when the froth and foam have subsided, we discover that the goblet is not more than half-filled with the golden liquid that was poured into it.

  Louise Imogen Guiney

  Heart, Ambition, Thinking

  Louise Imogen Guiney (1885). “Goose-quill Papers”

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• All the beautiful orders of architecture and creations of the pencil, all the conceptions of the beautiful in nature and art and humanity, are inventions extorted, as it were, from the mind to extend and increase the pleasures of sense.

  Elihu Burritt

  Beautiful, Art, Order

  Elihu Burritt, Mary Botham Howitt (1854). “Thoughts and things at home and abroad”, p.72

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• Professed authors who overestimate their vocation are too full of themselves to be agreeable companions. The demands of their egotism are inveterate. They seem to be incapable of that abandon which is the requisite condition of social pleasure; and bent upon winning a tribute of admiration, or some hint which they can turn to the account of pen-craft, there is seldom in their company any of the delightful unconsciousness which harmonizes a circle.

  Henry Theodore Tuckerman

  Winning, Circles, Hints

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• Had we a privilege of calling up by the power of memory only such passages as were pleasing, unmixed with such as were disagreeable, we might then excite at pleasure an ideal happiness, perhaps more poignant than actual sensation.

  Henry Theodore Tuckerman

  Memories, Might, Privilege

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• Sweet is the pleasure itself cannot spoil.
  Is not true leisure one with true toil?

  John Sullivan Dwight

  Sweet, Toil, Leisure

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• The world of time, of space and condition, pleasure and pain, birth, growth, maturation, decay and death, spinning, spinning, spinning this world, always spinning.

  Frederick Lenz

  Pain, Buddhism, Space

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• We could take all the pleasures that have ever been and will ever be in all the universes and add them up into one experience. If you were absorbed in nirvana, it wouldn't be noticed.

  Frederick Lenz

  Buddhism, Suffering, Add

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