"If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy. If it were merely challenging, that would be no problem. But I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day."
— E.B. White

"7 DEADLY SINS

Wealth without work

Pleasure without conscience

Science without humanity

Knowledge without character

Politics without principle

Commerce without morality

Worship without sacrifice."
— Mahatma Gandhi

"I adore simple pleasures. They are the last refuge of the complex."
— Oscar Wilde

"Give them pleasure. The same pleasure they have when they wake up from a nightmare."
— Alfred Hitchcock

"....Americans have an inability to relax into sheer pleasure.Ours is an entertainment seeking-nation, but not necessarily a pleasure-seeking one....This is the cause of that great sad American stereotype- the overstressed executive who goes on vacation, but who cannot relax."
— Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia)

"I finally figured out the only reason to be alive is to enjoy it. "
— Rita Mae Brown

"My God, a moment of bliss. Why, isn't that enough for a whole lifetime?"
— Fyodor Dostoevsky (White Nights)

"Many of us pursue pleasure with such breathless haste that we hurry past it."
— Søren Kierkegaard

"He that loves pleasure must for pleasure fall."
— Christopher Marlowe (Doctor Faustus)

"Let My worship be in the
heart that rejoices, for behold,
all acts of love and pleasure
are My rituals."
— Doreen Valiente

"Altruism is for those
who can't endure their desires.
There's a world

as ambiguous as a moan,
a pleasure moan
our earnest neighbors

might think a crime.
It's where we could live.
I'll say I love you,

Which will lead, of course,
to disappointment,
but those words unsaid

poison every next moment.
I will try to disappoint you
better than anyone else has.

--Mon Semblable"
— Stephen Dunn (Different Hours: Poems)

""So sweet and delicious do I become,
when I am in bed with a man
who, I sense, loves and enjoys me,
that the pleasure I bring excels all delight,
so the knot of love, however tight
it seemed before, is tied tighter still.""
— Veronica Franco (Poems and Selected Letters)

"You have a hierarchy of values; pleasure is at the bottom of the ladder, and you speak with a little thrill of self-satisfaction, of duty, charity, and truthfulness. You think pleasure is only of the senses; the wretched slaves who manufactured your morality despised a satisfaction which they had small means of enjoying. You would not be so frightened if I had spoken of happiness instead of pleasure: it sounds less shocking, and your mind wonders from the sty of Epicurus to his garden. But I will speak of pleasure, for I see that men aim at that, and I do not know that they aim at happiness. It is pleasure that lurks in the practice of every one of your virtues. Man performs actions because they are good for him, and when they are good for other people as well they are thought virtuous: if he finds pleasure in giving alms he is charitable; if he finds pleasure in helping others he is benevolent; if he finds pleasure in working for society he is public-spirited; but it is for your private pleasure that you give twopence to a beggar as much as it is for my private pleasure that I drink another whiskey and soda. I, less of a humbug than you, neither applaud myself for my pleasure nor demand your admiration."
— W. Somerset Maugham (Of Human Bondage)

"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."
— W. Somerset Maugham (Of Human Bondage)

"He went to the church, and walked about the streets, and watched the people hurrying to and for, and patted the children on the head, and questioned beggars, and looked down into the kitchens of homes, and up to the windows, and found that everything could yield him pleasure. He had never dreamed of any walk, that anything, could give him so much happiness. (p. 119)"
— Charles Dickens (A Christmas Carol)

"It is only by enlarging the scope of one’s tastes and one’s fantasies, by sacrificing everything to pleasure, that the unfortunate individual called Man, thrown despite himself into this sad world, can succeed in gathering a few roses among life’s thorns"
— Donatien Alphonse François de Sade

"Old boys have their playthings as well as young ones; the difference is only in the price."
— Benjamin Franklin

"The pleasure of living and the pleasure of the orgasm are identical. Extreme orgasm anxiety forms the basis of the general fear of life."
— Wilhelm Reich

"I care not that this moment’s lot was thin and sparsely dealt; all pleasures sweet can be forgot the instant they are felt."
— Roman Payne

"Make thy books thy companions. Let thy cases and shelves be thy pleasure grounds and gardens. "
— Judah ibn-Tibbon

"...when we say we're looking for a spiritual adviser, we're really looking for someone to tell us what to do with our bodies. Decisions of the flesh. We forget to learn from pleasure as well as pain."
— Anne Michaels (Fugitive Pieces: A Novel)

"The pleasure of criticizing takes away from us the pleasure of being moved by some very fine things."
— Jean de La Bruyère

"A lovely evening of new idioms and fresh mozzarella."
— Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia)

"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."
— Roland Barthes

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

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

"Remember the botched brothel-visit in L’Education sentimentale and remember its lesson. Do not participate: happiness lies in the imagination, not the act. Pleasure is found first in anticipation, later in memory."
— Julian Barnes (Flaubert's Parrot)

"The fiery force is nothing more than the life force as we know it. It is the flame of desire and love, of sex and beauty, of pleasure and joy as we consume and are consumed, as we burn with pleasure and burn out in time."
— Harold Norse (In the Hub of the Fiery Force: Collected Poems of Harold Norse 1934-2003)

"a joy that hurts with sadness
a sadness that is pleasurable
a pleasure full of terror
a terror that excites
an excitement that calms
a calmness that frightens."
— Aidan Chambers (N I K Now I Know)

"He felt the full warmth of that pleasure from which the proud shut themselves out; the pleasure which not only goes with humiliation, but which almost is humiliation. Men who have escaped death by a hair have it, and men whose love is returned by a woman unexpectedly, and men whose sins are forgiven them. Everything his eye fell on it feasted on, not aesthetically, but with a plain, jolly appetite as of a boy eating buns. He relished the squareness of the houses; he liked their clean angles as if he had just cut them with a knife. The lit squares of the shop windows excited him as the young are excited by the lit stage of some promising pantomime. He happened to see in one shop which projected with a bulging bravery on to the pavement some square tins of potted meat, and it seemed like a hint of a hundred hilarious high teas in a hundred streets of the world. He was, perhaps, the happiest of all the children of men. For in that unendurable instant when he hung, half slipping, to the ball of St. Paul's, the whole universe had been destroyed and re-created."
— G.K. Chesterton (The Collected Works of G.K. Chesterton Volume 07: The Ball and the Cross; Manalive; the Flying Inn)

"Seek for no meaning in it; it has none. What meaning is there in pain and pleasure? They are twins; that is all we know. Seek no meaning in anything you see here. Images, ideas, flashes of purpose will peer out in all our ways and deeds, but there is no intention here below. Is there any intention anywhere?"
— John Davidson (A Full and True Account of the Wonderful Mission of Earl Lavender, Which Lasted One Night and One Day: With a History of the Pursuit of Earl Lavender and Lord Brumm by Mrs Scamler and Maud Emblem)

"His distress and pleasure mixed and married, giving birth to several anxious children."
— Ann Brashares (The Last Summer)

"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."
— Roland Barthes