By firm immutable immortal laws Impress'd on Nature by the GREAT FIRST CAUSE, Say, MUSE! how rose from elemental strife Organic forms, and kindled into life; How Love and Sympathy with potent charm Warm the cold heart, the lifted hand disarm; Allure with pleasures, and alarm with pains, And bind Society in golden chains.
Self-control is one of the most exhilarating of pleasures.
He who takes his fill of every pleasure. . . becomes depraved; while he who avoids all pleasures alike. . . becomes insensible.
The world is so constructed, that if you wish to enjoy its pleasures, you also must endure its pains.
No man is a hypocrite in his pleasures.
And the pleasures and rewards of the intellect are inseparable from angst, uncertainty, conflict and even despair.
The love of solitude, when cultivated in the morn of life, elevates the mind to a noble independence, but to acquire the advantages which solitude is capable of affording, the mind must not be impelled to it by melancholy and discontent, but by a real distaste to the idle pleasures of the world, a rational contempt for the deceitful joys of life, and just apprehensions of being corrupted and seduced by its insinuating and destructive gayeties.
In my twenties, my pleasures tended to be physical. In my thirties, my pleasures tended to be intellectual. I can't say which was more exquisite.
A foreign minister, I will maintain it, can never be a good man of business if he is not an agreeable man of pleasure too. Half his business is done by the help of his pleasures: his views are carried on, and perhaps best, and most unsuspectedly, at balls, suppers, assemblies, and parties of pleasure; by intrigues with women, and connections insensibly formed with men, at those unguarded hours of amusement.
One of the pleasures of reading is seeing this alteration on the pages, and the way, by reading it, you have made the book yours.
We are all environmentalists now, but we are not all planetists. An environmentalist realizes that nature has its pleasures and deserves respect. A planetist puts the earth ahead of the earthlings.
We anticipate our own happiness, and eat out the heart and sweetness of worldly pleasures by delightful forethought of them.
The pleasures that once were heaven look silly at sixty-seven.
Sure, I eat because I have to. But I also eat because I want to. It is one of life's few pleasures.
Marriage is the highest state of friendship. If happy, it lessens our cares by dividing them, at the same time that it doubles our pleasures by mutual participation.
One of life's few really reliable pleasures: to have a family you love, and to leave them for a week.
One half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other.
Often people, when they're confronted with a poem, it's like someone who keep saying 'what is the meaning of this? What is the meaning of this?' And that dulls us to the other pleasures poetry offers.
People argue themselves out of their pleasures
One of the greatest of all mental pleasures is to have our thoughts often divined: ever entered into with sympathy.