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What we are only now beginning to fully realize is that in seeking material pleasure too constantly, the capacity for enjoyment or fulfillment decreases and eventually becomes exhausted.

People repeat behaviour that leads to flooding their brains with pleasurable chemicals. The short-term reward loop acts over hours to years, and the long-term reproductive success loop over generations.

Is it not strange that desire should so many years outlive performance?

There is no age limit on the enjoyment of sex. It keeps getting better.

When you've done something for more than a third of your life, your whole adult life, and then all of a sudden you're going to have to switch off and say, 'No more,' you want to grasp as much of it and enjoy the last few years of it as much as you can. Because you can't get those years back.

Technological society has succeeded in multiplying the opportunities for pleasure, but it has great difficulty in generating joy.

Pleasure becomes a value, a teleological end in itself. It's probably more Western than U.S. per se.

Maturity is achieved when a person postpones immediate pleasures for long-term values.

When you achieve a certain amount of success, you want to be doing something else.

It is the paradox of life that the way to miss pleasure is to seek it first. The very first condition of lasting happiness is that a life should be full of purpose, aiming at something outside self.