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“Nothing is pleasanter to me than exploring in a library.”
― Walter Savage Landor, Pericles and Aspasia

“And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time’s malleability.”
― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

“The best traveler is one without a camera.”
― Kamand Kojouri

“My name,�� I whispered in her ear, and she shivered with pleasure. “Say my name again. Not in anger, or disgust, but as you did just now. As if I am the only man in the world who can satisfy you.
~Liam C.”
― J.J. McAvoy, Ruthless People

“If the portraits of our absent friends are pleasant to us, which renew our memory of them and relieve our regret for their absence by a false and empty consolation, how much more pleasant are letters which bring us the written characters of the absent friend.”
― Héloïse d'Argenteuil, The Letters of Abélard and Héloïse

“Never force yourself to read a book that you do not enjoy. There are so many good books in the world that it is foolish to waste time on one that does not give you pleasure.”
― Atwood H. Townsend, Good Reading

“In the midst of happiness or despair
in sorrow or in joy
in pleasure or in pain:
Do what is right and you will be at peace.”
― Jess Rothenberg, The Catastrophic History of You and Me

“In life there are two things which are dependable. The pleasures of the flesh and the pleasures of literature.”
― Sei Shōnagon, The Pillow Book

“But there must be some pleasure in condemning everything--in perceiving faults where others think they see beauties.'
'You mean there is pleasure in having no pleasure.”
― Voltaire, Candide

“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, The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols, and Other Writings

“‎Pleasure is wild and sweet. She likes purple flowers. She loves the sun and the wind and the night sky. She carries a silver bowl full of liquid moonlight. She has a cat named Midnight with stars on his paws. Many people mistrust Pleasure, and even more misunderstand her. For a long time I could barely stand to be in ...the same room with her...”
― J. Ruth Gendler, The Book of Qualities

“I like a good story and I also like staring at the sea-- do I have to choose between the two?”
― David Byrne, How Music Works

“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

“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 and Other Essays

“Consider the capacity of the human body for pleasure. Sometimes, it is pleasant to eat, to drink, to see, to touch, to smell, to hear, to make love. The mouth. The eyes. The fingertips, The nose. The ears. The genitals. Our voluptific faculties (if you will forgive me the coinage) are not exclusively concentrated here. The whole body is susceptible to pleasure, but in places there are wells from which it may be drawn up in greater quantity. But not inexhaustibly. How long is it possible to know pleasure? Rich Romans ate to satiety, and then purged their overburdened bellies and ate again. But they could not eat for ever. A rose is sweet, but the nose becomes habituated to its scent. And what of the most intense pleasures, the personality-annihilating ecstasies of sex? I am no longer a young man; even if I chose to discard my celibacy I would surely have lost my stamina, re-erecting in half-hours where once it was minutes. And yet if youth were restored to me fully, and I engaged again in what was once my greatest delight �� to be fellated at stool by nymphet with mouth still blood-heavy from the necessary precautions �� what then? What if my supply of anodontic premenstruals were never-ending, what then? Surely, in time, I should sicken of it.

“Even if I were a woman, and could string orgasm on orgasm like beads on a necklace, in time I should sicken of it. Do you think Messalina, in that competition of hers with a courtesan, knew pleasure as much on the first occasion as the last? Impossible.

“Yet consider.

“Consider pain.

“Give me a cubic centimeter of your flesh and I could give you pain that would swallow you as the ocean swallows a grain of salt. And you would always be ripe for it, from before the time of your birth to the moment of your death, we are always in season for the embrace of pain. To experience pain requires no intelligence, no maturity, no wisdom, no slow working of the hormones in the moist midnight of our innards. We are always ripe for it. All life is ripe for it. Always.”
― Jesus Ignacio Aldapuerta, The Eyes: Emetic Fables from the Andalusian De Sade

“Some people talk about other people’s failures with so much pleasure that you would swear they are talking about their own successes.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“if only these treasures were not so fragile as they are precious and beautiful.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther

“There is a cosmic law which says that every satisfaction must be paid for with a dissatisfaction.”
― G.I. Gurdjieff

“Imagination is absolutely critical to the quality of our lives. Our imagination enables us to leave our routine everyday existence by fantasizing about travel, food, sex, falling in love, or having the last word—all the things that make life interesting. Imagination gives us the opportunity to envision new possibilities—it is an essential launchpad for making our hopes come true. It fires our creativity, relieves our boredom, alleviates our pain, enhances our pleasure, and enriches our most intimate relationships.”
― Bessel A. van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma

“Come live with me and be my Love,
And we will all the pleasures prove”
― Christopher Marlowe, The Complete Plays and Poems

“I have a sense that God is unfair and preferentially punishes his weak, his dumb, his fat, his lazy. I believe he takes more pleasure in his perfect creatures, and cheers them on like a brainless dad as they run roughshod over the rest of us. He gives us a need for love, and no way to get any. He gives us a desire to be liked, and personal attributes that make us utterly unlikable. Having placed his flawed and needy children in a world of exacting specifications, he deducts the difference between what we have and what we need from our hearts and our self-esteem and our mental health.”
― George Saunders, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline

“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

“She was cold by nature, self-love predominating over passion; rather than being virtuous, she preferred to have her pleasures all to herself.”
― Émile Zola, Pot Luck

“I don’t regret for a single moment having lived for pleasure.
I did it to the full, as one should do everything that one does. There was no pleasure I did not experience.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“Fame to an artist is like light to a vampire.”
― Rebecca Harlem, The Pink Cadillac

“To a man, sex is the ultimate expression of love. It is pure pleasure. But to a woman there exists something greater than pleasure―gestures of adoration. A gentle caress on the cheek, an attentive smile, a soft kiss while swept away in a slow dance, the whispered words 'You're beautiful'―these are the tokens of love that women cherish.”
― Richelle E. Goodrich, Making Wishes: Quotes, Thoughts, & a Little Poetry for Every Day of the Year

“We are so constituted that we can gain intense pleasure only from the contrast, and only very little from the condition itself.”
― Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents

“The most total opposite of pleasure is not pain but boredom, for we are willing to risk pain to make a boring life interesting.”
― Peter Kreeft, Jesus-Shock

“I didn’t hear words that were accurate, much less prideful. For example, I never once heard the word clitoris. It would be years before I learned that females possessed the only organ in the human body with no function than to feel pleasure. (If such an organ were unique to the male body, can you imagine how much we would hear about it—and what it would be used to justify?)”
― Gloria Steinem , The Vagina Monologues

“We are sometimes dragged into a pit of unhappiness by someone else’s opinion that we do not look happy.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana