Pleasures, Satisfaction, Desire: Quotations, Sayings, Wisdom, Poetry, Aphorisms

"Man, Nietzsche contended, is a being that has leapt beyond the "bestial bounds of the mating season" and seeks pleasure not just at fixed intervals but perpetually. Since, however, there are fewer sources of pleasure than his perpetual desire for pleasure demands, nature has forced man on the "path of pleasure contrivance." Man, the creature of consciousness whose horizons extend to the past and the future, rarely attains complete fulfillment within the present, and for this reason experiences something most likely unknown to any animal, namely boredom. This strange creature seeks a stimulus to release him from boredom. If no such stimulus is readily available, it simply needs to be created. Man becomes the animal that plays. Play is an invention that engages the emotions; it is the art of stimulating the emotions. Music is a prime example. Thus, the anthropological and physiological formula for the secret of art: "The flight from boredom is the mother of all art." "
- Rudiger Safranski, Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography, p. 23

“You must learn some of my philosophy. Think only of the past as its remembrance gives you pleasure.”
- Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

"Our brightest blazes of gladness are commonly kindled by unexpected sparks."
- Samuel Johnson, The Idler; Poems

"Take care of the luxuries and the necessities will take care of themselves."
- Dorothy Parker

"How easy is it for one benevolent being to diffuse pleasure around him, and how truly is a kind heart a fountain of gladness, making everything in its vicinity to freshen into smiles."
- Washington Irving

"If it does not come at the last to gladness, then to hell with it."
- Douglas Wilson, Angels in the Architecture

“I adore simple pleasures. They are the last refuge of the complex.”
- Oscar Wilde

"You say, 'If I had a little more, I should be very satisfied.' You make a mistake. If you are not content with what you have, you would not be satisfied if it were doubled."
- Charles Haddon Spurgeon

"It isn't the great big pleasures that count the most; it is making a great deal out of the little ones."
- Jean Webster

"I don't believe in guilty pleasures. If you enjoy something, there is nothing guilty about it."
- Busy Phillips

"Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you."
- Harold Bloom

"A great pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do."
- Walter Bagehot

"In truth, either reason is joking or her target must be our happiness; all the labor of reason must be to make us live well, and at our ease. All the opinions of the world reach the same point, that pleasure is our target even thought they may get there by different means; otherwise we would throw them out immediately, for who would listen to anyone whose goal was to achieve for us pain and suffering."
- Michel de Montaigne, #20

"There is no pleasure in having nothing to do; the fun is having lots to do and not doing it."
- Andrew Jackson

"Pleasure and pain, like light and darkness, succeed one another."
- Laurence Sterne

"The rule of my life is to make business a pleasure, and pleasure my business.
- Aaron Burr

"I don't believe in guilty pleasures, if you fucking like something, like it."
- Dave Grohl

"One must be prepared to fight for one's simple pleasures and to defend them against elegance
and erudition and all manner of glamorous enticements."
- Amor Towles

"As far as I am concerned, I prefer silent vice to ostentatious virtue."
- Albert Einstein

"People rarely succeed unless they have fun in what they are doing.”"
- Dale Carnegie

“So she thoroughly taught him that one cannot take pleasure without giving pleasure, and that every gesture, every caress, every touch, every glance, every last bit of the body has its secret, which brings happiness to the person who knows how to wake it. She taught him that after a celebration of love the lovers should not part without admiring each other, without being conquered or having conquered, so that neither is bleak or glutted or has the bad feeling of being used or misused.”
- Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

"All men want, not something to do with, but something to do, or rather something to be."
- Henry David Thoreau, Walden

"You can't always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you might find, you get what you need."
- Mick Jagger

“Her pleasure in the walk must arise from the exercise and the day, from the view of the last smiles of the year upon the tawny leaves and withered hedges, and from repeating to herself some few of the thousand poetical descriptions extant of autumn--that season of peculiar and inexhaustible influence on the mind of taste and tenderness--that season which has drawn from every poet worthy of being read some attempt at description, or some lines of feeling.”
- Jane Austen, Persuasion

“To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life.”
- W. Somerset Maugham, Books and You

The Calculus of Felicity

Intensity: How powerful is the pleasure?
Duration: How long lasting is the pleasure?
Certainty: How guaranteed is the pleasure?
Proximity: How close is the pleasure?
Fecundity: Will this pleasurable activity generate additional pleasures?
Purity: How pain-free is this particular pleasure?
Extent: How many other persons will experience this pleasure?

- Jeremy Bentham, 1748-1832
We might add: Financial: What is the cost of the objects that provide the pleasure? Environmental: What are the
consequences to our environment if we indulge in this pleasure?

"There is no such thing as pure pleasure; some anxiety always goes with it."
- Ovid, Metamorphoses

"Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do. On the one hand the standard of right and wrong, on the other the chain of causes and effects, are fastened to their throne. They govern us in all we do, in all we say, in all we think ..."
- Jeremy Bentham, The Principals of Morals and Legislation

"Life, death, preservation, loss, failure, success, poverty, riches, worthiness, unworthiness, slander, fame, hunger, thirst, cold, heat─ these are the alterations of the world, the workings of fate. Day and night they change place before us and wisdom cannot spy out their source. Therefore, they should not be enough to destroy your harmony; they should not be allowed to enter the storehouse of the spirit. If you can harmonize and delight in them, master them and never be a a loss for joy, if you can do this day and night without break and make it be spring with everything, mingling with all and creating the moment within your own mind─ this is what I call being whole in power."
- Zhuangzi, Burton Watson translation, p. 69.; Zhuangzi Section 5, circa 300 BCE.

"Men may scoff, and men may pray, but they pay every pleasure with a pain."
- William Henley

"You are currently experiencing desire; otherwise, you wouldn't be reading these words. Even if you are reading them at the behest of someone else, you are motivated by your desire to please that person. And if you stop reading, you will do so no because you have stopped desiring but because your desires have changed."
- Willam B. Irvine, On Desire

"Test, try, experiment - within reason.
Manage your pleasures and desires.
Be open to thinking and feeling in new ways.
Sometimes ignore what other people tell you to do or not to do.
Old values are not necessarily better values.
What is "bad" in one generation may be "good" in later times.
Enjoy the pleasure of eating apples.
When someone tells you not to ask, sometimes ask and ask again.
With only one life to live - be bolder.
Don't resist the temptation to improve, to change, to grow.
Like water, enjoy going downhill in new directions.
Embrace intellectual pleasures.
Be suspicious of people who talk too much about guilt and punishment.
Some failures are inevitable, just get up and move on.
Thinking and doing are often more advantageous than believing.
Many people associate sexual pleasure with 'sinfulness': nonsense.
Succumb to temptations to laugh more often.
If you can't take advantage of temptations then you are not free.
Remember what works for you.
- Mike Garofalo, On Not Resisting Temptations

"The poor have very few hours in which to enjoy themselves; they must take their pleasure raw; they haven't the time to cook it."
- William Butler Yeats, Where There is Nothing

"But pleasures are like poppies spread,
You seize the flower, its bloom is shed;
Or, like the snow falls in the river,
The moment white, then melts for ever."
- Robert Bursn, Tam O'Shanter

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

“I set out to discover the why of it, and to transform my pleasure into knowledge.”
- Charles Baudelaire

"If it be a point of humanity for man to bring health and comfort to man, and especially to mitigate and assuage the grief of others, and by taking from them the sorrow and heaviness of life to restore them to joy, that is to say, to pleasure, why may it not then be said that nature does provoke every man to do the same to himself?"
- Thomas More

"I'm not in search of sanctity, sacredness, purity; these things are found after this life, not in this life; but in this life I search to be completely human: to feel, to give, to take, to laugh, to get lost, to be found, to dance, to love and to lust, to be so human."
- C. JoyBell C.

"The art of life lies in taking pleasures as they pass, and the keenest pleasures are not intellectual, nor are they always moral."
- Aristippus, Cyrenaics

“I was surrounded by friends, my work was immense, and pleasures were abundant. Life, now, was unfolding before me, constantly and visibly, like the flowers of summer that drop fanlike petals on eternal soil. Overall, I was happiest to be alone; for it was then I was most aware of what I possessed. Free to look out over the rooftops of the city. Happy to be alone in the company of friends, the company of lovers and strangers. Everything, I decided, in this life, was pure pleasure.”
- Roman Payne, Rooftop Soliloquy

“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.”
- Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

"In diving to the bottom of pleasure we bring up more gravel than pearls."
- Honore de Balzac

"There is something self-defeating in the too-conscious pursuit of pleasure."
- Max Eastman

"Fun I love, but too much fun is of all things the most loathsome. Mirth is better than fun, and happiness is better than mirth."
- Thomas Carlyle

“When enough is not enough, a Hedonist is born.”
- Sukant Ratnakar, Open The Win

“The Hedonistic Imperative outlines how genetic engineering and nanotechnology will abolish suffering in all sentient life. This project is ambitious but technically feasible. It is also instrumentally rational and ethically mandatory. The metabolic pathways of pain and malaise evolved only because they once served the fitness of our genes. They will be replaced by a different sort of neural architecture. States of sublime well-being are destined to become the genetically pre-programmed norm of mental health. The world's last aversive experience will be a precisely dateable event.”
- David Pearce

“What did the Romans say? “De gustibus non est disputandum”: It is worthless to discuss personal taste. It is called 'personal' for a reason.”
- Massimo Marino, Daimones

"It is much easier to suppress a first desire than to satisfy those that follow."
- Benjamin Franklin

"The size of your success is measured by the strength of your desire; the size of your dream; and how you handle disappointment along the way."
- Robert Kiyosaki

"I take it as a prime cause of the present confusion of society that it is too sickly and too doubtful to use pleasure frankly as a test of value."
- Rebecca West

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

"Pleasure is the only thing to live for. Nothing ages like happiness."
- Oscar Wilde

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

"There is a beast in man that should be exercised, not exorcised."
- Anton LaVey

"I don't crave companionship. It stands in my way. I live for pleasure. There are few persons who can give me as much pleasure as those acts I perform myself. I would rather create pleasure according to my own whim than be subjected to the whims of others."
- Anton LaVey

"Most men pursue pleasure with such breathless haste that they hurry past it."
- Søren Kierkegaard

"Don't allow your mind to tell your heart what to do. The mind gives up easily."
- Paulo Coelho

"Perhaps the only way to be often happy with everything happening around or anywhere is to feel nothing about anything and anyone, but always bear in mind that only a lunatic stays in such mood."
- Anuj Somany

"If extravagance were a fault, it would not have a place in the festivals of the gods."
- Aristippus, Cyrenaics

"Faith is not Desire. Faith is Will. Desires are things that need to be satisfied, whereas Will is a force. Will changes the space around us,..."
- Paulo Coelho, The Witch Of Portobello

"The Fremen were supreme in that quality the ancients called "spannungsbogen" -- which is the self-imposed delay between desire for a thing and the act of reaching out to grasp that thing."
- Frank Herbert, Dune

"I enjoy it when the world smiles; the more smiles, the warmer I am."
- Dejan Stojanovic, The Shape

"To the Technocrats: Have mercy on us. Relax a bit, take time out for simple pleasures. For example, the luxuries of electricity, indoor plumbing, central heating, instant electronic communication and such, have taught me to relearn and enjoy the basic human satisfactions of dipping water from a cold clear mountain stream; of building a wood fire in a cast-iron stove; of using long winter nights for making music, making things, making love; of writing long letters, in longhand with a fountain pen, to the few people on this earth I truly care about."
- Edward Abbey, Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast

"It is a self-deception of philosophers and moralists to imagine that they escape decadence by opposing it. That is beyond their will; and, however little they acknowledge it, one later discovers that they were among the most powerful promoters of decadence."
- Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power

"When you enjoy doing something it no longer feels like a task but an essential aspiration."
- Ryan Howe

"In life one has a choice to take one of two paths: to wait for some special day - or to celebrate each special day."
- Rasheed Ogunlaru

"It isn't normal to know what we want. It is a rare and difficult psychological achievement."
- Abraham Maslow

"Habit is the intersection of knowledge (what to do), skill (how to do), and desire (want to do)."
- Stephen R. Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

"You will become as small as your controlling desire; as great as you dominant aspiration."
- James Allen

"Evolution has no foresight. Complex machinery develops its own agendas. Brains — cheat. Feedback loops evolve to promote stable heartbeats and then stumble upon the temptation of rhythm and music. The rush evoked by fractal imagery, the algorithms used for habitat selection, metastasize into art. Thrills that once had to be earned in increments of fitness can now be had from pointless introspection. Aesthetics rise unbidden from a trillion dopamine receptors, and the system moves beyond modeling the organism. It begins to model the very process of modeling. It consumes evermore computational resources, bogs itself down with endless recursion and irrelevant simulations. Like the parasitic DNA that accretes in every natural genome, it persists and proliferates and produces nothing but itself. Metaprocesses bloom like cancer, and awaken, and call themselves I."
- Peter Watts, Blindsight

"Decline is also a form of voluptuousness, just like growth. Autumn is just as sensual as springtime. There is as much greatness in dying as in procreation."
- Iwan Goll

"We can often endure an extra pound of pain far more easily than we can suffer the withdrawal of an ounce of accustomed pleasure."
- Sydney J. Harris

"True happiness is to enjoy the present, without anxious dependence upon the future, not to amuse ourselves with either hopes or fears but to rest satisfied with what we have, which is sufficient, for he that is so wants nothing. The greatest blessings of mankind are within us and within our reach. A wise man is content with his lot, whatever it may be, without wishing for what he has not."
- Seneca

"There are two ways to get enough. One is to continue to accumulate more and more. The other is to desire less."
- G. K. Chesterton

"Happiness is not a goal...it's a by-product of a life well lived."
- Eleanor Roosevelt

"The said truth is that it is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong."
- Jeremy Bentham

"The difference between egoistic hedonism and altruistic hedonism is but an adjective."
- John Stack IV

"In so much firm, pleasure-loving flesh, we cannot find the merest trace of a moral nervous system. That explains the whole enigma of Casanova's subtle genius. Lucky man that he is, he has only sensuality, and lacks the first beginnings of a soul. Bound by no ties, having no fixed aim, restrained by no prudent considerations, he can move at a different tempo from his fellow mortals, who are burdened with moral scruples, who aim at an ethical goal, who are tied by notions of social responsibility. That is the secret of his unique impetus, of his incomparable energy."
- Stefan Zweig, Casanova: A Study in Self-Portraiture

"To burn with desire and keep quiet about it is the greatest punishment we can bring on ourselves."
- Federico García Lorca, Blood Wedding and Yerma

"Men go to far greater lengths to avoid what they fear than to obtain what they desire."
- Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code

"Everyone believes very easily whatever he fears or desires."
- Jean de La Fontaine

"Desire is the key to motivation, but it’s determination and commitment to an unrelenting pursuit of your goal - a commitment to excellence - that will enable you to attain the success you seek."
- Mario Andretti

"These examples suggest what one needs to learn to control attention. In principle any skill or discipline one can master on one’s own will serve: meditation and prayer if one is so inclined; exercise, aerobics, martial arts for those who prefer concentrating on physical skills. Any specialization or expertise that one finds enjoyable and where one can improve one’s knowledge over time. The important thing, however, is the attitude toward these disciplines. If one prays in order to be holy, or exercises to develop strong pectoral muscles, or learns to be knowledgeable, then a great deal of the benefit is lost. The important thing is to enjoy the activity for its own sake, and to know that what matters is not the result, but the control one is acquiring over one’s attention."
- Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Finding Flow: The Psychology Of Engagement With Everyday Life

"A harmless hilarity and a buoyant cheerfulness are not infrequent concomitants of genius; and we are never more deceived than when we mistake gravity for greatness, solemnity for science, and pomposity for erudition."
- Charles Caleb Colton

"It takes desire to attempt, unsuccessfully, to extinguish desire."
- William B. Irvine, On Desire

"Decadent cooks go one step further and make sculptures of the food itself. If life is to be spent in pursuit of the extravagant, the extreme, the grotesque, the bizarre, then one's diet should reflect the fact. Life, meals, everything must be as artificial as possible - in fact works of art. So why not begin by eating a few statues?"
- Medlar Lucan, The Decadent Cookbook

"Though it may feel otherwise, enjoying life is no more dangerous than apprehending it with continuous anxiety and gloom."
- Alain de Botton

"If you want to have the time of your life, change how you use the time in your life."
- Tim Fargo

"The only real difficulty with becoming disciplined is when you buy into the notion that happiness comes at the price of sacrifice. The reality is this: Discipline becomes freedom when you are doing what you love."
- Shannon L. Alder

"I believe in the flesh and the appetites;
Seeing, hearing, feeling, are miracles, and each part and tag of me is a miracle.
Divine am I inside and out, and I make holy whatever I touch or am touch’d from;
The scent of these arm-pits, aroma finer than prayer;
This head more than churches, bibles, and all the creeds."
- Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

"Ah, make the most of what we yet may spend, Before we too into the Dust descend."
- Omar Khayyam

"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."
- Samuel Johnson

"Pleasure's a sin, and sometimes sin's a pleasure."
- Lord Byron, Don Juan

"A life of mere pleasure! A little while, in the spring-time of the senses, in the sunshine of prosperity, in the jubilee of health, it may seem well enough. But how insufficient, how mean, how terrible when age comes, and sorrow, and death! A life of pleasure! What does it look like when these great changes beat against it--when the realities of eternity stream in? It looks like the fragments of a feast, when the sun shines upon the withered garlands, and the tinsel, and the overturned tables, and the dead lees of wine."
- E. H. Chapin, Living Words

"Pleasure is a crumbling statue."
- Edward Counsel, Maxims

"A pleasure is full grown only when it is remembered."
- C. S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet

"True pleasures are paid for in advance; false pleasures afterwards, with heavy and compound interest."
- John Lubbock, Peace and Happiness

"Enough is as good as a feast."
- English Proverb

"Be moderate in order to taste the joys of life in abundance."
- Epicurus

"A fit, healthy body—that is the best fashion statement."
- Jess C. Scott

"You must give everything to make your life as beautiful as the dreams that dance in your imagination."
- Roman Payne

"Erase from your vocabulary the word “someday.” Do not save things for “special occasions.” Take into account the fact that every day is special. Every day is a gift that we must appreciate and be thankful for. Wear your attractive clothes, wear your nice perfume, use your fine silverware and dishes, and drink from your expensive crystal glasses … just because. Live every day to the fullest and savor every minute of it."
- Rodolfo Costa, Advice My Parents Gave Me

"We must not only obtain Wisdom: we must enjoy her."
- Marcus Tullius Cicero, Selected Works

"To go beyond is as wrong as to fall short."
- Confucius, Analects

"The problem for us is not are our desires satisfied or not. The problem is how do we know what we desire."
- Slavoj Žižek

"She had known happiness, exquisite happiness, intense happiness, and it silvered the rough waves a little more brightly, as daylight faded, and the blue went out of the sea and it rolled in waves of pure lemon which curved and swelled and broke upon the beach and the ecstasy burst in her eyes and waves of pure delight raced over the floor of her mind and she felt, It is enough! It is enough!"
- Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

"Enjoyment is not a goal, it is a feeling that accompanies important ongoing activity."
- Paul Goodman

"Nothing is easier than self-deceit. For what every man wishes, that he also believes to be true."
- Demosthenes

"What we insistently desire, over time, is what we become."
- Neal A. Maxwell

"One must be serious about something, if one wants to have any amusement in life."
- Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

"Life is unpredictable so let's have a joyous and ridiculous moment with a wondrous expression."
- Avinash Advani

"Time spent thinking about life is better spent enjoying it."
- Marty Rubin

"You must not know too much or be too precise or scientific about birds and trees and flowers and watercraft; a certain free-margin, and even vagueness - ignorance, credulity - helps your enjoyment of these things."
- Henry David Thoreau

If you obey all the rules, you miss all the fun."
- Katherine Hepburn

"Musical compositions can be very sad - Chopin - but you have the pleasure of this sadness. The cheap consolation is: you will be happy. The higher consolation is the pleasure and recognition of your unhappiness, the pleasure of having recognised that fate, destiny and life are such as they are and so you reach a higher form of consciousness."
- Umberto Eco

The Five Senses and Pleasure

"It's more interesting isn't it, if I've got a hedonistic dark side?"
- Michael Fassbender

"This generation... they have a different attitude. Instead of sitting and watching something, they want to be a part of it - they're very hedonistic and sensual."
- Steve Wynn

"As you walk down the fairway of life you must smell the roses, for you only get to play one round."
- Ben Hogan

"Be absolutely determined to enjoy what you do."
- Gerry Sikorski

"It is impossible to live a pleasant life without living wisely and well and justly. And it is impossible to live wisely and well and justly without living a pleasant life."
- Epicurus

"We revel in the laxness of the path we take."
- Charles Baudelaire

"The exotic and the erotic ideals go hand in hand, and this fact also contributes another proof of a more or less obvious truth - that is, that a love of the exotic is usually an imaginative projection of a sexual desire."
- Mario Praz, The Romantic Agony

"Elaborate burial customs are a sure sign of decadence."
- J.G. Ballard, The Complete Short Stories

"Art is contemplation. It is the pleasure of the mind which searches into nature and which there divines the spirit of which nature herself is animated."
- Auguste Rodin

"Joy and Temperance and Repose, slam the door on the doctor's nose."
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

"There is no such thing as perpetual tranquility of mind while we live here; because life itself is but motion, and can never be without desire, nor without fear, no more than without sense."
- Thomas Hobbes

"Always desire to learn something useful."
- Sophocles

“A child's reading is guided by pleasure, but his pleasure is undifferentiated; he cannot distinguish, for example, between aesthetic pleasure and the pleasures of learning or daydreaming. In adolescence we realize that there are different kinds of pleasure, some of which cannot be enjoyed simultaneously, but we need help from others in defining them. Whether it be a matter of taste in food or taste in literature, the adolescent looks for a mentor in whose authority he can believe. He eats or reads what his mentor recommends and, inevitably, there are occasions when he has to deceive himself a little; he has to pretend that he enjoys olives or War and Peace a little more than he actually does. Between the ages of twenty and forty we are engaged in the process of discovering who we are, which involves learning the difference between accidental limitations which it is our duty to outgrow and the necessary limitations of our nature beyond which we cannot trespass with impunity. Few of us can learn this without making mistakes, without trying to become a little more of a universal man than we are permitted to be. It is during this period that a writer can most easily be led astray by another writer or by some ideology. When someone between twenty and forty says, apropos of a work of art, 'I know what I like,'he is really saying 'I have no taste of my own but accept the taste of my cultural milieu', because, between twenty and forty, the surest sign that a man has a genuine taste of his own is that he is uncertain of it. After forty, if we have not lost our authentic selves altogether, pleasure can again become what it was when we were children, the proper guide to what we should read.”
- W.H. Auden, The Dyer's Hand

"I exist only as a whole; my only claim is to be natural, and the pleasure I feel in an action, I take as a sign that I ought to do it."
- André Gide, The Immoralist

"It is a mistake,” he said, “to suppose that the public wants the environment protected or their lives saved and that they will be grateful to any idealist who will fight for such ends. What the public wants is their own individual comfort."
- Isaac Asimov, The Gods Themselves

"But that's the whole aim of civilization: to make everything a source of enjoyment."
- Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

"If a book is well written, I always find it too short."
- Jane Austen, Catharine and Other Writings

Hedonism: Bibliography, Links, Quotations, Resources, Notes

"Of the thousands who have paid homage to virtue, barely one has thought to inspect the pedestal on which it stands."
- Frances Wright

“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

"Ultimately, it is the desire, not the desired, that we love."
- Friedrich Nietzsche

"Those who restrain desire do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained."
- William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

"They luxuriated in the feeling of deep and all pervading satisfaction, a feeling of knowing absolutely that all was well with the world and them and that the world was not only their oyster it was also their linguine with clam sauce. Not only were all things possible, but all things were theirs."
- Hubert Selby Jr., Requiem for a Dream

Advice Beauty Bibliography Blog Body-Mind Broad Minded Cheerfulness

Contemplation Desires Dharmapada Sutra Education Epicureanism Equanimity

Feeling Fitness Five Senses Friendship Gardening Generosity Good Life

Happiness Hedonism Hospitality Independence Kindness Learning Lifestyle Links

Meditation Memory Mindfulness Moderation Neo-Paganism Open Minded Paramitas

Patience Philosophy Play Pleasures Qigong Reading Secular Self-Reliance

Sensory Pleasures Simplicity Solitude Somaesthetics Spirituality Stoicism Taijiquan

Tao Te Ching Thinking Tolerance Touching Tranquility Vigor Virtues Vision

Walking Willpower Wisdom Wonder Yoga Zen Precepts

"Yes, there is a Nirvana; it is leading your sheep to a green pasture, and in putting your child to sleep, and in writing the last line of your poem."
- Kahlil Gibran, Sand and Foam

“What destroys a man more quickly than to work, think and feel without inner necessity, without any deep personal desire, without pleasure - as a mere automaton of duty?”
- Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo

"Love is an irresistible desire to be irresistibly desired."
- Robert Frost

"The starting point of all achievement is desire."
- Napoleon Hill

"The madness of the eyes is the lure of the abyss. Sirens lurk in the dark depths of the pupils as they lurk at the bottom of the sea, that I know for sure - but I have never encountered them, and I am searching still for the profound and plaintive gazes in whose depths I might be able, like Hamlet redeemed, to drown the Ophelia of my desire."
- Jean Lorrain, Monsieur De Phocas

Somaesthetics: Body-Mind Practices and Theories

"Like symbolism, decadence puts forth the idea that the function of literature is to evoke impressions and 'correspondences', rather than to realistically depict the world. ... the decadent aestheticized decay and took pleasure in perversity. In decadent literature, sickness is preferable to health, not only because sickness was regarded as more interesting, but because sickness was construed as subversive, as a threat to the very fabric of society. By embracing the marginal, the unhealthy and the deviant, the decadents attacked bourgeois life, which they perceived as the chief enemy of art."
- Asti Hustvedt

"The best way, indeed, perhaps the only way, to attain lasting happiness is not to change the world around us or our place in it, but to change ourselves."
- William B. Irvine, On Desire

"If you always attach positive emotions to the things you want, and never attach negative emotions to the things you don't, then that which you desire most will invariably come your way."
- Matt D. Miller

"We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure, but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless furnace of this world."
- Jack Gilbert

"It is indisputable that the being whose capacities of enjoyment are low, has the greatest chance of having them fully satisfied; and a highly endowed being will always feel that any happiness which he can look for, as the world is constituted, is imperfect. But he can learn to bear its imperfections, if they are at all bearable; and they will not make him envy the being who is indeed unconscious of the imperfections, but only because he feels not at all the good which those imperfections qualify. It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, is of a different opinion, it is only because they only know their own side of the question."
- John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism

"As long as I have a want, I have a reason for living. Satisfaction is death."
- George Bernard Shaw, Overruled

"Believe me! The secret of reaping the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment from life is to live dangerously!"
- Friedrich Nietzsche

"Doing is the great thing, for if people resolutely do what is right, they come in time to like doing it."
- John Ruskin

Recommended Reading

The Art of Happiness. By Epicurus. Translation and commentary by George K. Strodach. Penguin Classics, 2012.

The Birth of Hedonism: The Cyrenaic Philosophers and Pleasure as a Way of Life. By Kurt Lampe. Princeton University Press, 2014.

The Conquest of Happiness By Bertrand Russell. Introduction by Daniel Dennett. Liveright, 1930, 2013.

Epicurean and Hedonistic Philosophy: Bibliography, Resources, Quotations, Information

Epicureanism at the Origins of Modernity By Catherine Wilson. Oxford University Press, 2008.

Epicureanism: A Very Short Introduction By Catherine Wilson. Oxford University Press, 2016.

The Five Senses and Pleasure

Nicomachean Ethics By Aristotle. Translated by Christopher Rowe. Commentary and notes by Sarah Broadie. Oxford University Press, 2002.

Research by
Michael P. Garofalo, M.S.

This webpage was last edited, expanded, changed, modified or updated on September 6, 2020.

This webpage was first distributed online on August 6, 2012.

Pleasures

Satisfaction, Delight, Pleasant Feelings, Sensuality, Enjoyment, Happiness,
Joy, Gladness, Wanting, Avoiding Pain, Peace of Mind, Desires, Libertinage
Happy, Thrilling, Ecstatic, Achievement, Painless, Decadence, Self-Interest

Hedonism, Epicureanism, Egoism, Utilitarianism

Quotations, Sayings, Aphorisms, Quips, Quotes, Wisdom, Poetry

Compiled by Michael P. Garofalo
Green Way Research, Red Bluff, California

Virtue Ethics How to Live a Good Life Hedonism Epicureanism Main Index

Happiness Tranquility Equanimity Kindness Pleasures Moderation

Gardening Taijiquan Qigong Hatha Yoga Walking

Cloud Hands Blog Facebook

The Calculus of Felicity

Research by
Michael P. Garofalo, M.S.

Pleasures Satisfaction, Delight, Pleasant Feelings, Sensuality, Enjoyment, Happiness, Joy, Gladness, Wanting, Avoiding Pain, Peace of Mind, Desires, Libertinage Happy, Thrilling, Ecstatic, Achievement, Painless, Decadence, Self-Interest Hedonism, Epicureanism, Egoism, Utilitarianism

Quotations, Sayings, Aphorisms, Quips, Quotes, Wisdom, Poetry

Compiled by Michael P. Garofalo Green Way Research, Red Bluff, California

Virtue Ethics How to Live a Good Life Hedonism Epicureanism Main Index

Happiness Tranquility Equanimity Kindness Pleasures Moderation

Gardening Taijiquan Qigong Hatha Yoga Walking

Cloud Hands Blog Facebook

The Calculus of Felicity

Research by Michael P. Garofalo, M.S.

Pleasures

Satisfaction, Delight, Pleasant Feelings, Sensuality, Enjoyment, Happiness,
Joy, Gladness, Wanting, Avoiding Pain, Peace of Mind, Desires, Libertinage
Happy, Thrilling, Ecstatic, Achievement, Painless, Decadence, Self-Interest

Hedonism, Epicureanism, Egoism, Utilitarianism

Compiled by Michael P. Garofalo
Green Way Research, Red Bluff, California

Research by
Michael P. Garofalo, M.S.