Pleasure

But if not even the praise of the virtues themselves — on which the discourse of the other philosophers most exults — can find any issue unless it be directed toward pleasure, while pleasure alone is that which calls us to itself and allures us by its own nature, there can be no doubt that this is the highest and uttermost of all goods, and that to live happily is nothing else than to live with pleasure.

if speechless infants, and even the dumb beasts, all but proclaim, with Nature for their teacher and guide, that nothing is welcome but pleasure, nothing harsh but pain, and judge of these neither perversely nor corruptly — ought we not to feel the deepest gratitude to him who, having heard this, as it were, voice of Nature, so firmly and gravely grasped it that he led all the sound of mind into t …

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

But whereas the mass of mankind take pleasure in things that conflict with one another, because they are not pleasant of their own nature, things pleasant by nature are pleasant to lovers of what is noble, and so always are actions in conformity with virtue, so that they are pleasant essentially as well as pleasant to lovers of the noble.

Therefore their life has no need of pleasure as a sort of ornamental appendage, but contains its pleasure in itself.

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

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.

And do you reckon this man, I will not say among men of worth, but among men at all, whose highest good is in flavours and colours and sounds?

Pain is what is experienced by all as disagreeable.

Pleasure is what is experienced by all as agreeable.

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.

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?

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.

\"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.

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

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.

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

and those called Annicereans, from the Cyrenaic succession, set down no defined end of the whole life, but said that of each action the proper end is the pleasure that results from the action.

But they, poured out unto pleasure like goats, outraging the body as it were, give themselves to soft living, not knowing that the body wastes away, being by nature in flux, while their soul is buried in the mire of vice — pursuing the doctrine of pleasure itself, and not that of an apostolic man.

For if we are willing to survey human nature as a whole, we shall find that the majority of men do not take pleasure in the food that is the most wholesome, nor in the pursuits that are the most honorable, nor in the actions that are the noblest, nor in the creatures that are the most useful, but that they have tastes which are in every way contrary to their best interests, while they view those w …

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;

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.

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

Just as we hunt wild beasts with toil and danger, and even the keeping of those we have caught is full of anxiety—for they often tear their masters—so it is with great pleasures;

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.

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

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;

I assure you far fewer pleasures fall to despots than to citizens of modest means, and many more and much greater pains.

Well, said Simonides, taking the suggestion, I think I have observed that sights affect private citizens with pleasure and pain through the eyes, sounds through the ears, smells through the nostrils, meat and drink through the mouth, carnal appetites—of course we all know how.

the pleasures it experiences by means of these various organs are infinitely greater in number, and the pains it undergoes are far fewer.

Moreover, the delights of learning something good and excellent, and of studying some of the means whereby a man knows how to regulate his body well and manage his household successfully, to be useful to his friends and city and to defeat his enemies — knowledge that yields not only very great benefits but very great pleasures — these are the delights of the self-controlled;

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.

That though pleasure is the one and only goal to which incontinence is thought to lead men, she herself cannot bring them to it, whereas nothing produces pleasure so surely as self-control?