Pleasure Quotes - Page 39

• Salter is a writer who particularly rewards those for whom reading is an intense pleasure. He is among the very few North American writers all of whose work I want to read, whose as-yet-unpublished books I wait for impatiently.

  Susan Sontag

  Reading, Book, Waiting

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• The writing of Kathleen McGookey shines more brightly than most fine things we feel pleasure to read. Celebrate it!

  Naomi Shihab Nye

  Writing, Shining, Celebrate

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• Treating a person as a means to an end, and an end moreover which in this case is pleasure, the maximization of pleasure, will always stand in the way of love.

  Pope John Paul II

  Mean, Way, Ends

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• I think every parent takes more pleasure in seeing their child succeed than seeing themselves succeed.

  Jerry Reinsdorf

  Children, Thinking, Parent

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• Whatever events in progress shall disgust men with cities, and infuse into them the passion for country life, and country pleasures, will render a service to the whole face of this continent, and will further the most poetic of all the occupations of real life, the bringing out by art the native but hidden graces of the landscape.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Country, Art, Real

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1866). “The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Comprising His Essays, Lectures, Poems, and Orations”, p.295

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• If a man lose his balance, and immerse himself in any trades or pleasures for their own sake, he may be a good wheel or pin, but he is not a cultivated man.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Work, Men, Balance

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2015). “Essays”, p.63, Xist Publishing

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• The true thrift is always to spend on the higher plane; to invest and invest, with keener avarice, that he may spend in spiritualcreation, and not in augmenting animal existence. Nor is the man enriched, in repeating the old experiments of animal sensation; nor unless through new powers and ascending pleasures he knows himself by the actual experience of higher good to be already on the way to the highest.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Money, Animal, Men

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1866). “The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Comprising His Essays, Lectures, Poems, and Orations”, p.362

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• The counting-room maxims liberally expounded are laws of the Universe. The merchant's economy is a coarse symbol of the soul's economy. It is, to spend for power, and not for pleasure.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Money, Law, Soul

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1872). “Representative men. English traits. Conduct of life”, p.381

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• Profusion gives pleasure up to a point; then we become squeamish.

  Mason Cooley

  Giving, Excess

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• The philosophy of hedonism means little to lovers of pleasure. They have no inclination to read philosophy, or to write it.

  Mason Cooley

  Philosophy, Writing, Mean

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• Contempt for others, like masturbation, is best as a secret pleasure.

  Mason Cooley

  Secret, Masturbation, Contempt

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• Addicts turn their pleasures into vengeful Gods.

  Mason Cooley

  Addiction, Vengeful, Turns

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• A man who knows how to mix pleasures with business is never entirely possessed by them; he either quits or resumes them at his will; and in the use he makes of them he rather finds a relaxation than a dangerous charm that might corrupt him.

  Charles de Saint-Evremond

  Men, Relaxation, Use

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• The pleasure of reading biography, like that of reading letters, derives from the universal hunger to penetrate other lives.

  Patricia Ann Meyer Spacks

  Reading, Letters, Biographies

  Patricia Ann Meyer Spacks (1985). “Gossip”, Alfred a Knopf Inc

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• To desire money is much nobler than to desire success. Desiring money may mean desiring to return to your country, or marry the woman you love, or ransom your father from brigands. But desiring success must mean that you take an abstract pleasure in the unbrotherly act of distancing and disgracing other men.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Country, Money, Father

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• One pleasure attached to growing older is that many things seem to be growing younger; growing fresher and more lively than we once supposed them to be.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Growing, Aging, Lively

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• No one can understand Paris and its history who does not understand that its fierceness is the balance and justification of its frivolity. It is called a city of pleasure; but it may also very specially be called a city of pain. The crown of roses is also a crown of thorns. Its people are too prone to hurt others, but quite ready also to hurt themselves. They are martyrs for religion, they are martyrs for irreligion; they are even martyrs for immorality.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Hurt, Pain, Cities

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• Rabbits are a foolish people. They do not fight except with their own kind, nor use their paws except for feet, and appear to have no reason for existence but to furnish meals for meat-eaters. In flight they seem to rebound from the earth of their own elasticity, but keep a sober pace going to the spring. It is the young watercress that tempts them and the pleasures of society, for they seldom drink.

  Mary Hunter Austin

  Spring, Fighting, Feet

  Mary Hunter Austin, Marjorie Pryse (1987). “Stories from the Country of Lost Borders”, p.25, Rutgers University Press

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• Those then who know not wisdom and virtue, and are always busy with gluttony and sensuality, go down and up again as far as the mean; and in this region they move at random throughout life, but they never pass into the true upper world; thither they neither look, nor do they ever find their way, neither are they truly filled with true being, nor do they ever taste of pure and abiding pleasure.

  Socrates

  Moving, Mean, Abiding

  Socrates, Plato, Aristotle (1967). “Wit and Wisdom of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle: Being a Treasury of Thousands of Glorious, Inspiring and Imperishable Thoughts, Views and Observations of the Three Great Greek Philosophers, Classified Under about Four Hundred Subjects for Comparative Study”

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• One of the advantages of having laws is the pleasure one may take in breaking them.

  Iain Banks

  Law, May, Advantage

  "The Player of Games (The Culture, Book 2)". Book by Iain Banks (Chapter 2, p. 279), 1988.

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• Pleasures of the mind have this advantage,--they never cloy nor wear themselves out, but increase by employment.

  Frances Power Cobbe

  Mind, Employment, Increase

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• We are not masters of our own affections; our inclinations dailyalter: now we love pleasure, and anon we shall dote on business. Human frailty will have it so, and who can help it?

  George Etherege

  Helping, Affection, Anon

  1676 The Man of Mode or, Sir Fopling Flutter, act 2, sc.2.

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• Whatever good you would do out of fear of punishment, or hope of reward hereafter, the Atheist would do simply because it is good; and being so, he would receive the far surer and more certain reward, springing from well-doing, which would constitute his pleasure, and promote his happiness.

  Ernestine Rose

  Atheist, Punishment, Atheism

  Ernestine Louise Rose (2008). “Mistress of herself: speeches and letters of Ernestine L. Rose, early women's rights leader”, The Feminist Press at CUNY

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• How defeated and restless the child that is not doing something in which it sees a purpose, a meaning! It is by its self-directed activity that the child, as years pass, finds its work, the thing it wants to do and for which it finally is willing to deny itself pleasure, ease, even sleep and comfort.

  Ida Tarbell

  Children, Work, Sleep

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• Which of us that is thirty years old has not had its Pompeii? Deep under ashes lies the life of youth--the careless sport, the pleasure and the passion, the darling joy.

  William Makepeace Thackeray

  Sports, Lying, Passion

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