Pleasure Vs Happiness Quotes & Sayings

When you are in love, it means that the person you love is of great personal, selfish importance to you and to your life. If you were selfless, it would have to mean that you derive no personal pleasure or happiness from the company and the existence of the person you love, and that you are motivated only by self-sacrificial pity for that person's need of you. I don't have to point out to you that no one would be flattered by, nor would accept, a concept of that kind. Love is not self-sacrifice, but the most profound assertion of your own needs and values. It is for your own happiness that you need the person you love, and that is the greatest compliment, the greatest tribute you can pay to that person. — Ayn Rand

He was looking forward to his visit not only for the pleasure of the shrewd dealing which far transcended mere gross profit, but with the sheer happiness of being out of bed and moving once more at free will, even though a little weakly, in the sun and air which men drank and moved in and talked and dealt with one another - a pleasure no small part of which lay in the fact that he had not started yet and was absolutely nothing under heaven to make him start until he wanted to. He did not still feel weak, he was merely luxuriating in that supremely gutful lassitude of convalescence in which time, hurry, doing, did not exist, the accumulating seconds and minutes and hours to which in its well state the body's slave both waking and sleeping, now reversed and time now the lip-server and mendicant to the body's pleasure instead of the body thrall to time's headlong course. — William Faulkner

I am a friend to subordination, as most conducive to the happiness of society. There is a reciprocal pleasure in governing and being governed. — Samuel Johnson

Reading is pleasure and happiness to be alive or sadness to be alive and above all it's knowledge and questions. — Roberto Bolano

Here at last is her smile: burn it into your memory; you won't see it often. — Junot Diaz

The right to pursue happiness sends me and other Americans, even here where we are meant to resist outside temptation, on a hunt for it. If I'm not hungry, I might seek other forms of happiness, or pleasure, which is part of my American birthright, though the most misconceived notion of them or the most difficult to realize; I can pursue several means and ways to be happy, if I am able to forget what makes me habitually sad. — Lynne Tillman

I do not miss childhood, but I miss the way I took pleasure in small things, even as greater things crumbled. I could not control the world I was in, could not walk away from things or people or moments that hurt, but I took joy in the things that made me happy. — Neil Gaiman

I can sympathize with people's pains, but not with their pleasure. There is something curiously boring about somebody else's happiness. — Aldous Huxley

Happiness, true happiness, is an inner quality. It is a state of mind. If your mind is at peace, you are happy. If your mind is at peace, but you have nothing else, you can be happy. If you have everything the world can give - pleasure, possessions, power - but lack peace of mind, you can never be happy. — Dada Vaswani

Love is not selective, desire is selective. In love there are no strangers. When the centre of selfishness is no longer, all desires for pleasure and fear of pain cease; one is no longer interested in being happy; beyond happiness there is pure intensity, inexhaustible energy, the ecstasy of giving from a perennial source. — Nisargadatta Maharaj

The idea that skiing might not be fun, might not be for everyone, had never occurred to me. Where I come from, the sport signified pleasure, nature, family happiness. — Siri Hustvedt

Years of happiness can be lost in the foolish gratification of a momentary desire for pleasure. — Ezra Taft Benson

Pleasure can be supported by an illusion; but happiness rests upon truth. — Nicolas Chamfort

But though it cannot be reasonable not to gain happiness for fear of losing it, yet it must be confessed, that in proportion to the pleasure of possession, will be for some time our sorrow for the loss. — Samuel Johnson

To be born, to live and to die is merely to change forms ... And what does one form matter any more than another? ... Each form has its own sort of happiness and unhappiness. From the elephant down to the flea ... from the flea down to the sensitive and living molecule which is the origin of all, there is not a speck in the whole of nature that does not feel pain or pleasure. — John Dewey

If you have done something meritorious, you experience pleasure and happiness; if wrong things, suffering. A happy or unhappy life is your own creation. Nobody else is responsible. If you remember this, you won't find fault with anybody. You are your own best friend as well as your worst enemy. (99) — Swami Satchidananda

Our country in general assumes that "the pursuit of happiness" really means "the pursuit of pleasure" and that therefore pleasure is the greatest good. — Madeleine L'Engle

Where there is happiness, there is found pleasure in nonsense. The transformation of experience into its opposite, of the suitable into the unsuitable, the obligatory into the optional (but in such a manner that this process produces no injury and is only imagined in jest), is a pleasure; ... — Friedrich Nietzsche

Genuine happiness can only be achieved when we transform our way of life from the unthinking pursuit of pleasure to one committed to enriching our inner lives, when we focus on 'being more' rather than simply having more. — Daisaku Ikeda

It was one of those rare times of shared happiness, of perfect contentment. We had a feeling of expectation, that what was already wonderful would only get better and better as time went on. These moments are one of the rarest, most fragile things in the world. You have to seize the day; you have to recall all the rotten, dirty things you endured to earn this peace. You have to remember to enjoy each minute, each hour, because although you may feel like it's going to last forever, the world plans otherwise. You want to be grateful for every precious second, but you simply can't do it. It's not in human nature to live life to the fullest. Haven't your ever noticed that equal amounts of pain and joy are not, in fact, equal in duration? Pain drags on until you wonder if life will ever be bearable again; pleasure, though, once it's reached its peak, fades faster than a trodden gardenia, and your memory searches in vain for the sweet scent. — George Alec Effinger

She played a great deal better than either of the Miss Musgroves; but having no voice, no knowledge of the harp, and no fond parents to sit by and fancy themselves delighted, her performance was little thought of, only out of civility, or to refresh the others, as she was well aware. She knew that when she played she was giving pleasure only to herself; but this was no new sensation: excepting one short period of her life, she had never, since the age of fourteen, never since the loss of her dear mother, know the happiness of being listened to, or encouraged by any just appreciation or real taste. In music she had been always used to feel alone in the world; and Mr. and Mrs. Musgrove's fond partiality for their own daughters' performance, and total indifference to any other person's, gave her much more pleasure for their sakes, than mortification for her own. — Jane Austen

Is this the happiness you seek?" he whispered hoarsely. "Tell me now, and I will give it to you." He
moved down her body, his mouth on her bosom, his breath hot on her skin, and his hand freeing her
breast. Phoebe ran her fingers through his hair, thrusting her breast forward as he took the peak into his
mouth.
This was insanity!"Only a profligate would confuse happiness with desire - Oh!" The swell of pleasure
his mouth on her breast gave her was startling, and she cried out.
"And only a fool would try and separate the two," he responded hotly before he closed his mouth
around her other breast — Julia London

Laughter is more than just a pleasurable activity ... When people laugh together, they tend to talk and touch more and to make eye contact more frequently. — Gretchen Rubin

Back in those days I was stoned almost twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. The difference today is that there is nothing you or anyone else could say to persuade me to inhale enough even to fill a flea's lung with cannabis. It's actually impossible to measure how fantastic I feel. — Chris Sullivan

As a brother, a landlord, a master, she considered how many people's happiness were in his guardianship!
How much of pleasure or pain it was in his power to bestow!
How much of good or evil must be done by him! — Jane Austen

The theory which follows is entirely based on a calculus of pleasure and pain; and the object of economics is to maximize happiness by purchasing pleasure, as it were, at the lowest cost of pain. — William Stanley Jevons

The happiness of those who want to be popular depends on others; the happiness of those who seek pleasure fluctuates with moods outside their control; but the happiness of the wise grows out of their own free acts. — Marcus Aurelius

Pleasure is spread through the earth In stray gifts to be claimed by whoever shall find. — William Wordsworth

When I felt myself escaping from the earth," he commented, "my reaction was not pleasure but happiness." It was "a moral feeling," he added. "I could hear myself living, so to speak. — Julian Barnes

The necessity of pursuing true happiness is the foundation of all liberty- Happiness, in its full extent, is the utmost pleasure we are capable of. — John Locke