Worldly pleasures, such as flow from greatness, riches, honours, and sensual gratifications, are infinitely worse than none.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
There is more difference in the quality of our pleasures than in the amount.
We tire of those pleasures we take, but never of those we give.
I sometimes wonder whether all pleasures are not substitutes for joy.
As this world was not intended to be a state of any great satisfaction or high enjoyment, so neither was it intended to be a mere scene of unhappiness and sorrow.
Life affords no higher pleasure than that of surmounting difficulties, passing from one step of success to another, forming new wishes and seeing them gratified.
Pleasure has ever more been represented by poets and by painters as clothed in perpetual smiles and adorned with the richest jewels; and in real life, we have known many who, allured by her deceptions, blandishments, and hollow but showy temptations, have followed as she pointed until ruin has befallen them.
All earthly delights are sweeter in expectation than in enjoyment; but all spiritual pleasures more in fruition than in expectation.
True happiness... is not attained through self-gratification, but through fidelity to a worthy purpose.
Love is the most terrible, and also the most generous of the passions; it is the only one which includes in its dreams the happiness of someone else.
The greatest pleasures are only narrowly separated from disgust.