Quotes about Pleasure

The mind is never satisfied with the objects immediately before it, but is always breaking away from the present moment, and losing itself in schemes of future felicity... The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope.

Life admits not of delays; when pleasure can be had, it is fit to catch it. Every hour takes away part of the things that please us, and perhaps part of our disposition to be pleased.

Pleasure is very seldom found where it is sought our brightest blazes of gladness are commonly kindled by unexpected sparks.

Of all the animals, man is the only one that is cruel. He is the only one that inflicts pain for the pleasure of doing it.

The aim of the wise is not to secure pleasure, but to avoid pain.

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

But in all cases we must guard most carefully against what is pleasant, and pleasure itself, because we are not impartial judges of it.

Moral virtue is the quality of acting in the best way in relation to pleasures and pains, and that vice is the opposite.

The self-indulgent man, then, craves for all pleasant things or those that are most pleasant . . . Hence he is pained both when he fails to get them and when he is craving for them, for appetite involves pain.

The many, the most vulgar, would seem to conceive the good and happiness as pleasure, and hence they also like the life of gratification. Here they appear completely slavish, since the life they decide on is a life for grazing animals.

Again, it is harder to fight with pleasure than with anger, to use Heraclitus' phrase', but both art and virtue are always concerned with what is harder;

Even if our contact with eternal beings is slight, none the less because of its surpassing value this knowledge is a greater pleasure than our knowledge of everything around us.