Quotes About Pleasures Of Life

“Life is short
And pleasures few
And holed the ship
And drowned the crew
But o! But o!
How very blue
the sea is.”

— Clive Barker

“Technology, while providing us many advantages, encourages us to race through our days so that we no longer know what we'd do if we were to slow down. Labor-saving devices seem not only to have failed to enhance the quality of our lives and free up more time, but get between us and the immediate, sensory pleasures of life and increase the pressures on us to do more. Many of us feel cut off from life's blessings, from our neighbors, from the wonders of nature, and from our sense of our own significance in the scheme of things. Modern life leaves us spiritually starved”

— Kathleen A. Kendall-Tackett

“If Ayurveda were a religion Nature would be its Goddess, and overindulgence would be the sole sin She would punish. Ayurveda is meant to allow you to enjoy the pleasures of life up to the point that such enjoyment interferes with your health. Full-time gratification is in fact bondage, because the more we consume the more we become captives of our consumption.”

— Robert E. Svoboda

“There is a certain proper and luxurious way of lying in bed. Confucius, that great artist of life, "never lay straight" in bed, "like a corpse", but always curled up on one side. I believe one of the greatest pleasures of life is to curl up one's legs in bed. The posture of the arms is also very important, in order to reach the greatest degree of aesthetic pleasure and mental power. I believe the best posture is not lying flat on the bed, but being upholstered with big soft pillows at an angle of thirty degrees with either one arm or both arms placed behind the back of one's head.”

— Lin Yutang

“Expectations ruin the pleasures of life. To overcome every bad and appreciate every good, consider every day your last and take no one for granted.”

— Nael Gharzeddine

“I will not subscribe to the argument that ornament increases the pleasure of the life of a cultivated person, or the argument which covers itself with the words: "But if the ornament is beautiful! ... " To me, and to all the cultivated people, ornament does not increase the pleasures of life. If I want to eat a piece of gingerbread I will choose one that is completely plain and not a piece which represents a baby in arms of a horserider, a piece which is covered over and over with decoration. The man of the fifteenth century would not understand me. But modern people will. The supporter of ornament believes that the urge for simplicity is equivalent to self-denial. No, dear professor from the College of Applied Arts, I am not denying myself! To me, it tastes better this way.”

— Adolf Loos

“Conversation, to take another example, is one of the common pleasures of life, but not all conversation is pleasurable. The stutterer finds talking painful, and the listener is equally pained. Persons who are inhibited in expressing feeling are not good conversationalists. Nothing is more boring than to listen to a person talk in a monotone without feeling. We enjoy a conversation when there is a communication of feeling. We have pleasure in expressing our feelings, and we respond pleasurably to another person's expression of feeling. The voice, like the body, is a medium through which feeling flows, and when this flow occurs in an easy and rhythmic manner, it is a pleasure both to the speaker and listener.”

— Alexander Lowen

“The joys of theory are the sweetest intellectual pleasures of life”

— Ludwig Feuerbach

“This classmate told me that Plato drove this idea home in his dialogue Euthydemus, in which Socrates puts down the Sophists, claiming that a man learns more by "playing" with ideas in his leisure time that by sitting in a classroom. And Plato's successor, that world champion of pleasure, Epicurus, believed in a simple yet elegant connection between learning and happiness: the entire purpose of education was to attune the mind and sense to the pleasures of life.”

— Daniel Klein

“Reading is one of the true pleasures of life. In our age of mass culture, when so much that we encounter is abridged,adapted, adulterated, shredded, and boiled down, it is mind-easing and mind-inspiring to sit down privately with a congenial book ...”

— Thomas S. Monson

“I had a moral tutor, but never saw him (the only words of his I remember are 'The three pleasures of life -drinking, smoking, and masturbation')”

— Philip Larkin

“To dispatch one's friends to a dictionary from time to time is one of the more sophisticated pleasures of life, but it is one that must be indulged in sparingly: to do it too often may result in accusations of having swallowed one's own dictionary, which is not a compliment, whichever way one looks at it.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

“You who weep for pleasures fled, While dragging on a life of care, All your woes will melt in air, If to god your tears are shed, You who Weap!”

— Alexandre Dumas

“Eating is one of the great pleasures of life.”

— Adam Mansbach

“When energy is profoundly dissipated, the ability to think is clearly eroded, and the capacity to actively engage in the efforts and pleasures of life is fundamentally altered, then depression becomes an illness rather than a temporary or existential state.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

“It is really most absurd to wish to turn this scene of misery into a pleasure spot and set ourselves the goal of achieving pleasures and joys instead of freedom from pain, as so many do. Those who, with too gloomy a gaze, regard this world as a kind of hell and, accordingly, are only concerned with procuring a fireproof room in it, are much less mistaken. The fool runs after the pleasures of life and sees himself cheated; the sage avoids evils.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

“Speaking generally, sociability stands in inverse ratio with age. A little child raises a piteous cry of fright if it is left alone for only a few minutes; and later on, to be shut up by itself is a great punishment. Young people soon get on very friendly terms with one another; it is only the few among them of any nobility of mind who are glad now and then to be alone;-but to spend the whole day thus would be disagreeable. A grown-up man can easily do it; it is little trouble to him to be much alone, and it becomes less and less trouble as he advances in years. An old man who has outlived all his friends, and is either indifferent or dead to the pleasures of life, is in his proper element in solitude; and in individual cases the special tendency to retirement and seclusion will always be in direct proportion to intellectual capacity. For”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

“I think the idea of a soul mate is too romanticised, Don't get me wrong; romance is bliss, but to me, A soul mate is something so much more. It is possibility when hope falls short, it is waking on a Monday excited for breakfast - because it's with them, it's finding the simple pleasures of life so exhilarating - because your side by side, it is experiencing a connection that won't break, alter or dis-courage the growth of both individual journeys, a soul mate isn't just romance, to me it is so much more.”

— Nikki Rowe

“Far more important than the tribulations and heartaches, the thrills, merriment, and pleasures of life is what you learn from it all. It isn't the tunnel we pass through that matters, it's what emerges on the other side.”

— Richelle E. Goodrich

“Let us be greedy together; let us hoard. Let us hit each other with birch branches and lock each other in dungeons; let us drink each other's blood in the night and betray each other in the sun. Let us lie and lust and take hundreds of lovers; let us dance until snow melts between us. Let us steal and eat until we grow fat and roll in the pleasures of life, clutching each other for purchase.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

“I despise making the most of one's time. Half of the pleasures of life consist of the opportunities one has neglected.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

“Fresh air is good if you do not take too much of it; most of the achievements and pleasures of life are in bad air.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

“Even though everybody's lives are different, in general we're all human beings, and we go through the same things: disappointments, the pleasures of life, life and death. That's always been a really big part of the show to me, making sure the audience feels connected, and that carries through to the album.”

— Joan Jett

“The choicest pleasures of life lie within the ring of moderation.”

— Benjamin Disraeli

“In life, you have to keep certain parts of yourself in check because you want to be a decent human being. But one of the guilty pleasures of acting is that sometimes you get to let a little something out that you don't in life because it's not right.”

— Paul Dano

“My father was in the army, and there wasn't too much money. Yet, we learnt to enjoy the small pleasures of life, to look at the positives.”

— Suresh Raina

“Sleep is one of the great pleasures of life. Designing my bed linen line seemed like a natural progression for me. Everyone loves getting into a bed made up with beautiful linen. I love sewing, I love fabrics, and I love sleeping.”

— Twiggy

“Surveys of personal values in men and women find that the men assign a lopsided value to professional status compared to all the other pleasures of life.108”

— Steven Pinker

“One of the juiciest pleasures of life is to be able to salute and embrace, as elected leaders and honored representatives, people whom you first met when they were on the run or in exile or (like Adam) in and out of jail. I was to have this experience again, and I hope to have it many more times in the future: it sometimes allows me to feel that life is full of point.”

— Christopher Hitchens

“It wasn't that she wanted to seduce him-not literally. But flirting was a pleasure, and flirting with intelligent people-male or female-was one of the supreme pleasures of life.”

— Brian Morton

“I have read that the secret of gallantry is to accept the pleasures of life leisurely, and its inconveniences with a shrug; as well as that, among other requisites, the gallant person will always consider the world with a smile of toleration, and his own doings with a smile of honest amusement, and Heaven with a smile which is not distrustful - being thoroughly persuaded that God is kindlier than the genteel would regard as rational.”

— James Branch Cabell

“The dogs in our lives, the dogs we come to love and who (we fervently believe) love us in return, offer more than fidelity, consolation, and companionship. They offer comedy, irony, wit, and a wealth of anecdotes, the "shaggy dog stories" and "stupid pet tricks" that are commonplace pleasures of life.”

— Marjorie Garber

“My chief study all my life has been to lighten misfortunes and multiply pleasures, as far as human nature can.”

— Mary Wortley Montagu

“All the great pleasures of life are silent.”

— Georges Clemenceau

“It is so hard for us little human beings to accept this deal that we get. It's really crazy, isn't it? We get to live, then we have to die ... What spirit human beings have! It is a pretty cheesy deal - all the pleasures of life, and then death.”

— Gilda Radner

“The fundamental truth of democracy is the belief that the real pleasures of life are increased by sharing them.”

— Henry Dwight Sedgwick

“A child's eyes, those clear, wells of undefiled thought - what on earth can be more beautiful? Full of hope, love and curiosity, they meet your own. In prayer, how earnest; in joy, how sparkling; in sympathy, how tender! The man who never tried the companionship of a little child has carelessly passed by one of the great pleasures of life, as one passes a rare flower without plucking it or knowing its value”

— Caroline Norton

“I loved the excitement and the pleasures of life in New York, the opportunities for advancement, the pursuit of ambition, the theaters, the places of amusement, and such nights as the last I spent with you just as I was leaving for the West.”

— Cass Gilbert

“They are surely to be esteemed the bravest spirits who, having the clearest sense of both the pains and pleasures of life, do not on that account shrink from danger.”

— Thucydides

“All the other pleasures of life seem to wear out, but the pleasure of helping others in distress never does.”

— Julius Rosenwald

“To shut yourself from history is to shut yourself off from say music or painting or the theatre, literature for the rest of your life. It would be to cheat yourself of the pleasures of life.”

— David McCullough

“I think that a good education ought to be in part the idea that ease and joy are not synonymous. Some of the most fulfilling pleasures of life are to be found in work - found in work you love to do, work you want to do, work that makes you want to get out of bed in the morning.”

— David McCullough

“Health is so necessary to all the duties, as well as pleasures of life, that the crime of squandering it is equal to the folly.”

— Samuel Johnson

“Observation is the most enduring of the pleasures of life.”

— George Meredith

“Sun lighting a child's hair. A friend's embrace. Slow dancing in a safe and quiet place. The pleasures of an ordinary life.”

— Judith Viorst

“[Some] people really expect the passion of love to fill and gratify every need of life, whereas nature only intended that it should meet one of many demands. They insist on making it stand for all the emotional pleasures of life and art; expecting an individual and self-limited passion to yield infinite variety, pleasure, and distraction, and to contribute to their lives what the arts and the pleasurable exercise of the intellect gives to less limited and less intense idealists.”

— Willa Cather

“A voyage without companionship, that is to say without conversation, is one of the saddest pleasures of life.”

— Madame De Stael

“The sacrifice which causes sorrow to the doer of the sacrifice is no sacrifice. Real sacrifice lightens the mind of the doer and gives him a sense of peace and joy. The Buddha gave up the pleasures of life because they had become painful to him.”

— Mahatma Gandhi

“The conversation with the dead is one of the great pleasures of life. Somebody who is sitting reading Chekhov, Beckett, reading Toni Morrison - you are not in any way dead, in many ways you are intensely alive.”

— Cornel West

“Playing with appearances and mastering the arts of deception are among the aesthetic pleasures of life. They are also key components in the acquisition of power.”

— Robert Greene