Pleasure

Pleasure is often spoiled by describing it.
Stendhal

There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge.
Bertrand Russell

Why not seize the pleasure at once, how often is happiness destroyed by preparation, foolish preparations.
Jane Austen

One of the most lasting pleasures you can experience is the feeling that comes over you when you genuinely forgive an enemy – whether he knows it or not.
O. A. Battista

I sometimes wonder whether all pleasures are not substitutes for joy.
C.S. Lewis

Pleasure is the bait of sin
Plato

To do something, say something, see something, before anybody else – these are things that confer a pleasure compared with which other pleasures are tame and commonplace, other cheap and trivial
Mark Twain

The greatest pleasure of life is love.
Euripides

Do not bite at the bait of pleasure, till you know there is no hook beneath it.
Thomas Jefferson

… the use of our intelligence quite properly gives us pleasure. In this respect the brain is like a muscle. When we think well, we feel good. Understanding is a kind of ecstasy.
Dr. Carl Sagan

An inordinate passion for pleasure is the secret of remaining young
Oscar Wilde

Pleasure is the object, duty and the goal of all rational creatures.
Voltaire

For let me tell you, that the more the pleasures of the body fade away, the greater to me is the pleasure and charm of conversation
Plato

All kinds of beauty do not inspire love; there is a kind that only pleases the sight but does not captivate the affections.
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

Pleasure is the flower that passes; remembrance, the lasting perfume.
Jean de Boufflers

It gives me great pleasure indeed to see the stubbornness of an incorrigible nonconformist warmly acclaimed.
Albert Einstein

The greatest and noblest pleasure which men can have in this world is to discover new truths; and the next is to shake off old prejudices.
Frederick The Great

If we could all live solitary and without labor, we could all enjoy this ecstasy of independence; since we cannot, its delights are only available to madmen and dictators
Bertrand Russell

It is only a poor sort of happiness that could ever come by caring very much about our own pleasures. We can only have the highest happiness such as goes along with being a great man, by having wide thoughts and much feeling for the rest of the world as well as ourselves.
George Eliot

The career of a writer is comparable to that of a woman of easy virtue. You write first for pleasure, later for the pleasure of others and finally for money.
Marcel Achard

It is the paradox of life that the way to miss pleasure is to seek it first. The very first condition of lasting happiness is that a life should be full of purpose, aiming at something outside self.
Hugo Black

The arts are not just instantaneous pleasure – if you don’t like it, the artist is wrong. I belong to the generation which says if you don’t like it, you don’t understand and you ought to find out.
Ethel Barrymore

Love is born with the pleasure of looking at each other, it is fed with the necessity of seeing each other, it is concluded with the impossibility of separation.
Oscar Wilde

Simple pleasures are always the last refuge of the complex
Oscar Wilde

With the catching ends the pleasure of the chase.
Abraham Lincoln

Joy is never in our power and pleasure often is.
C.S. Lewis

The noblest pleasure is the joy of understanding.
Leonardo da Vinci

Perhaps all pleasure is only relief.
William S. Burroughs

Life affords no higher pleasure than that of surmounting difficulties, passing from one step of success to another, forming new wishes and seeing them gratified.
Samuel Johnson

It seems to me that if you or I must choose between two courses of thought or action, we should remember our dying and try so to live that our death brings no pleasure on the world.
John Steinbeck

Some mathematician has said pleasure lies not in discovering truth, but in seeking it.
Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy

He who allows his day to pass by without practicing generosity and enjoying life’s pleasures is like a blacksmith’s bellows: he breathes but does not live.
Proverb

True enjoyment comes from activity of the mind and exercise of the body; the two are ever united
Karl Wilhelm von Humboldt

Throw moderation to the winds, and the greatest pleasures bring the greatest pains
Democritus

Most things in life are moments of pleasure and a lifetime of embarrassment; photography is a moment of embarrassment and a lifetime of pleasure.
Tony Benn

The essence of pleasure is spontaneity
Germaine Greer

Visits always give pleasure – if not the arrival, the departure
Portuguese Proverb

Pleasure is the greatest incentive to evil.
Plato