Pleasure

Equipped with these things, he is always in pleasure.

There is no error in the ends of goods and evils themselves — that is, in pleasure or in pain;

that the greatest pleasure or trouble of the mind brings more weight toward a happy or a wretched life than either of them, if it last an equal time in the body.

And further, the life of active virtue is essentially pleasant.

But if so, actions in conformity with virtue must be essentially pleasant.

Some people think happiness is goodness or virtue, others prudence, others a form of wisdom;

but when, yielding to pleasure (the serpent is the allegory of pleasure, creeping upon its belly, an earthly wickedness, fed upon matter), he was led aside by lusts, the child, made manly by disobedience and disobeying his Father, was ashamed before God.

it is a wicked island, heaped with bones and corpses, and there sings within it a fair little harlot, pleasure, delighting in vulgar music:

That the many are mastered by pleasure has perhaps its excuse;

" Harsh is Pleasure, and she carries bonds, by her own nature flowery and soft at the first, such as kings or tyrants are likely to be bound with, and all who are called the children of the blessed;

What enemy was ever so insolent to any man as some men's pleasures are to them?

And so men plunge themselves into pleasures which, once brought into habit, they cannot do without, and they are most wretched on this account, that they have come to the point where the things that had been superfluous have become necessary.

That other thing, pleasure, is the good of cattle.

Pain is what is experienced by all as disagreeable.

Pleasure is what is experienced by all as agreeable.

But you reckon these the lighter pleasures, those by which, as it were, a tickling (for this is Epicurus's word) is applied to the senses.

What food, then, or what drinks, or what varieties of sounds or flowers, what touches, what scents will you set before the gods to flood them with pleasures?

I do not suppose you wish to be like the rest of the Epicureans, who are ashamed of certain sayings of Epicurus, in which he testifies that he cannot even understand any good that is severed from delicate and obscene pleasures — which indeed, without blushing, he pursues all of them by name.

that pleasure is the highest good — a saying which to me seems to be the voice of cattle, not of men.

And yet if pleasure, which is defended by the patronage of so many, is not to be reckoned among good things, and if the greater it is the more it dislodges the mind from its seat and station, then surely to live well and happily is nothing other than to live honourably and rightly.

Come, if we do not understand his pleasure, do we not understand his pain either?

\"But the same man says that pleasure does not increase when pain is taken away, and that the highest pleasure is to feel no pain.

he asks, in the hearing of the Roman people, how he is consistent with himself, in seeking corn under that law which he had argued against.

For of those who begin from pleasure .

Epicurus, then, and the Cyrenaics say the first thing proper is pleasure;

" And the things upon these, as many as are shamefully said, yet worthily of the pleasure-lovers.

you ought not to judge what things are worthy or what men are wise by the standard of pleasure, but to appraise them in the light of conduct that is useful;

Wherefore we may well admire the poet Homer and the first inventors of tragedy, seeing that they, with true insight into human nature, have embodied both kinds of pleasure in their poetry;

Govern yourself no less than your subjects, and consider that you are in the highest sense a king when you are a slave to no pleasure but rule over your desires more firmly than over your people.

take it and look at the three—mind, truth, and pleasure;

Then, according to the judgement which has now been given by our discussion, the power of pleasure would be fifth.

Next, then, consider measure in the same way, and see whether pleasure possesses more of it than wisdom, or wisdom than pleasure.

Well, are those who define the good as pleasure infected with any less confusion of thought than the others?

But pleasure is extinguished at the very moment when it most delights;

Even those who have called pleasure the highest good see in what a base place they have set it.

pleasure is something low, slavish, feeble and perishable, whose station and dwelling are the brothels and the cook-shops.

I think that the concupiscences named generally contain in themselves the pleasures too;

For where there is pleasure, there is also eagerness, by which, namely, pleasure has its savour;

For so great is the force of pleasures that it prolongs ignorance for its own opportunity and corrupts conscience into dissembling.

exclaimed Simonides.

And how should all the world envy despots?

Sleep, it seems clear to me, affects us with pleasure;

and the pleasantest life is theirs who are conscious that they are growing in goodness.

), but because they think that they too would rise highest in goodness by being with me.

But self-control alone causes them to endure the sufferings I have named, and therefore she alone causes them to experience any pleasure worth mentioning in such enjoyments.