The aim of the wise is not to secure pleasure, but to avoid pain.
Happiness, true happiness, is an inner quality. It is a state of mind. If your mind is at peace, you are happy. If your mind is at peace, but you have nothing else, you can be happy. If you have everything the world can give – pleasure, possessions, power – but lack peace of mind, you can never be happy.
There is pleasure when a sore is scratched, But to be without sores is more pleasurable still. Just so, there are pleasures in worldly desires, But to be without desires is more pleasurable still.
It’s a great pleasure having survived six generations of TV critics.
I love watching ‘The Real Housewives of New York.’ That’s my guilty pleasure. But I don’t even feel guilty. I can just watch it, zone out, and forget about my problems.
Asymmetric balance creates greater reader interest. Pleasure derived from observing asymmetrical arrangements lies partly in overcoming resistances, which, consciously or not, the spectator adjusts in his own mind.
It’s the same thing that drives people to want to experience sexual pleasure or have one too many drinks. We all want to experience the other, and to get out of our daily existence.
These are the people who do studies that your carry-out Chinese meals are saturated in fat. I’d just like to meet them! I mean, what do they do for pleasure?
I come from a family of craftsmen. We like to make things with our hands. Better than the pleasure of making money is the pleasure of making the product and saying, ‘Wow. I did that.’ I couldn’t see myself doing anything other than making good things to eat.
I can think of nothing less pleasurable than a life devoted to pleasure.
It’s just such a pleasure to bring a talent you respect to the world.
Working with Mario Testino was a joy. He’s very young spirited, and it’s always lovely and a pleasure to spend time talking to him about all different things.
The speculative object and the practical object of philosophy as Naturalism, science and pleasure, coincide on this point: it is always a matter of denouncing the illusion, the false infinite, the infinity of religion and all of the theologico-erotic-oneiric myths in which it is expressed.
It’s lonely to listen to the pleasure of others, not that I’ve made a habit of that kind of eavesdropping. There’s joy and passion in the next room, in the next bed, but it’s not yours.
Nothing good gets written without the writer suffering along the way, in my opinion. Writing should be a pleasure, but unless you feel almost broken many, many times in the journey to a novel, you haven’t pushed yourself hard enough.
People seem to read so much more nonfiction than fiction, and so it always gives me great pleasure to introduce a friend or family member to a novel I believe they’ll cherish but might not otherwise have thought to pick up and read.
O thou Sun, send me as far over the earth as is my pleasure and thine, and may I make the acquaintance of good men, but never hear anything of bad ones, nor they of me.
In love, as in gluttony, pleasure is a matter of the utmost precision.
I feel that it means a lot to the people of Iran that my film is represented at the Oscars, and it makes me happy to bring them that joy, that I’m representing them and that I’m able to give them that element of pleasure to be the envoy from Iran. It’s a very pleasant thing.
Your chances of success are directly proportional to the degree of pleasure you desire from what you do. If you are in a job you hate, face the fact squarely and get out.
I have the distinct pleasure of doing exactly what I want to do and get paid for it. It’s a joy.
May your divinity, Lord, take pleasure in me and lead me above the world to be with you.
It is a clear gain to sacrifice pleasure in order to avoid pain.
Poetry is that sentiment of the soul, or faculty of the mind, which enables its possessor to appreciate and realize the heights and depths of human experience. It is the power to feel pleasure or suffer pain in all its exquisiteness and intensity.
Secularism does not accept many things as absolutes. Its principal objectives are pleasure and self-interest. Often, those who embrace secularism have a different look about them.
Exhort all your household often that all those who serve you shall know to serve God and you, faithfully and painstakingly, and for the will of God to prefer in all things to do your will and pleasure in all things that are not against God.
If a site is done with pleasure and a fun attitude, it’s a great way to communicate with your fans.
At an incredibly divisive point in pop history, Donna Summer managed to create an undeniable across-the-board experience of mass pleasure – after ‘Bad Girls,’ nobody ever tried claiming disco sucked again. It set the template for what Michael Jackson would do a few months later with ‘Off The Wall.’
Business is always interfering with pleasure – but it makes other pleasures possible.
There’s a way that you can throw negativity out there that seems rebellious. But I’ve always taken pleasure in a different kind of rebellion, which is putting a positive spin on everything, trying to enjoy myself at all times.
The best an American can look forward to is the lonely pleasure of one who stands at long last on a chilly and inhospitable mountaintop where few have been before, where few can follow and where few will consent to believe he has been.
Virtue is its own reward, and brings with it the truest and highest pleasure; but if we cultivate it only for pleasure’s sake, we are selfish, not religious, and will never gain the pleasure, because we can never have the virtue.
I write everything in Courier 12 because I write for publication, not pleasure.
The sight of parents, children and grandparents all descending on a tented field to enjoy the pleasure of ideas and books renews my faith in humanity.
Everyone says Oscar Wilde was a dandy, but he wasn’t – he was an aesthete. He took pleasure in food and stuff like that. Dandyism is much more austere – much more Calvinistic, more neurotic – it oscillates between narcissism and neurosis.
Ever since I began to compose, I have remained true to my starting principle: not to write a page because no matter what public, or what pretty girl wanted it to be thus or thus; but to write solely as I myself thought best, and as it gave me pleasure.
The addictive pleasure of abandoning yourself to a book, of losing consciousness of your worries, your body, and your surroundings, to become a ghost haunting other worlds has influenced me in many ways.
We are certainly in a common class with the beasts; every action of animal life is concerned with seeking bodily pleasure and avoiding pain.
I just don’t want anyone messing around with my pure smoking pleasure.
My one guilty pleasure is, every airport, I will drop everything to get an airport massage at those kiosks.
There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge.
Work is not man’s punishment. It is his reward and his strength and his pleasure.
My whole life is geared to play guitar. I play what I want when I want and I hope the listener gets as much pleasure listening to the music as I get playing it.
Everything that is new or uncommon raises a pleasure in the imagination, because it fills the soul with an agreeable surprise, gratifies its curiosity, and gives it an idea of which it was not before possessed.
There is no pleasure in having nothing to do; the fun is in having lots to do and not doing it.
The greatest pleasure of reading consists in re-reading.
There is some pleasure in doing a movie and problem solving on a specific movie and getting a movie made, but once they are done, we don’t look at them again, much less relate one to another.
Only he is successful in his business who makes that pursuit which affords him the highest pleasure sustain him.
I speak of a clinical depression that is the background of your entire life, a background of anguish and anxiety, a sense that nothing goes well, that pleasure is unavailable and all your strategies collapse.
It’s always a pleasure to talk about someone else’s work.
No state of society or laws can render men so much alike but that education, fortune, and tastes will interpose some differences between them; and though different men may sometimes find it their interest to combine for the same purposes, they will never make it their pleasure.
My parents both had Oxford degrees, they read important books, spoke foreign languages, drank real coffee and went to museums for pleasure. People like that don’t have fat kids: they were cut out to be winners and winners don’t have children who are overweight.
When men take pleasure in feeling their minds elevated with strong drink, and so indulge their appetite as to disorder their understandings, neglect their duty as members of a family or civil society, and cast off all regard to religion, their case is much to be pitied.
A scientist worthy of his name, about all a mathematician, experiences in his work the same impression as an artist; his pleasure is as great and of the same nature.
We are washed both on coming into the world and on going out of it, and we take no pleasure from the first washing nor any profit from the last.
