79 Quotes About Finding Pleasure

In a world that's often charged with a relentless pace and overwhelming demands, finding moments of genuine pleasure can serve as a refuge and a source of rejuvenation. The pursuit of happiness isn't always about grand gestures or achieving monumental milestones; sometimes, it's the little things, those fleeting moments, that bring the most joy. Our collection of 79 quotes about finding pleasure invites you to pause and cherish the simple yet profound experiences that can transform an ordinary day into an extraordinary one. Whether it's the warmth of a morning coffee, the tranquility of a sunset, or the laughter shared with friends, these reflections serve as a reminder to savor the beauty and joy that surrounds us every day.

1. “If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy. If it were merely challenging, that would be no problem. But I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.” - E.B. White

2. “He that loves pleasure must for pleasure fall.” - Christopher Marlowe

3. “Give them pleasure. The same pleasure they have when they wake up from a nightmare.” - Alfred Hitchcock

4. “The Seven Social Sins are: Wealth without work. Pleasure without conscience. Knowledge without character. Commerce without morality. Science without humanity. Worship without sacrifice. Politics without principle.From a sermon given by Frederick Lewis Donaldson in Westminster Abbey, London, on March 20, 1925.” - Frederick Lewis Donaldson

5. “People go on marrying because they can't resist natural forces, although many of them may know perfectly well that they are possibly buying a month's pleasure with a life's discomfort.” - Thomas Hardy

6. “I adore simple pleasures. They are the last refuge of the complex.” - Oscar Wilde

7. “Yet, whether to the glory or to the shame of human nature, in what we call pleasure (with an excess of scorn, perhaps) there are abysses as deep as those of love.” - Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly

8. “Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth.” - Samuel Johnson

9. “It is true, Monsieur," Raoule went on, shrugging her shoulders, "that I have had lovers in my life as I have books in my library, to know, to study. But I have had no passion, I have not written my own book yet! I always found myself alone when we were two. One is not weak when one remains master of one's self in the midst of the most stupefying pleasures.” - Rachilde

10. “It sometimes happens that pleasure blows anywhere it damn well chooses.” - Louis Aragon

11. “It is only by enlarging the scope of one’s tastes and one’s fantasies, by sacrificing everything to pleasure, that the unfortunate individual called Man, thrown despite himself into this sad world, can succeed in gathering a few roses among life’s thorns” - D.A.F. Marquis de Sade

12. “Face your life, its pain, its pleasure, leave no path untaken.” - Neil Gaiman

13. “The stranger was still smiling. He transformed himself into a rose bush and entwined me. My Christian education meant that ever since childhood I have had a horror of vice and it was not without a quite understandable terror that I discerned the pleasure I felt in the embrace of this vigorous bush whose branches gradually mingled with my limbs, my hair and my looks. When one of its flowers came apart in my mouth, I could feel myself grasping the sorcerer in my arms in my turn. He was transformed into a torrent, and I was a barge, into desert and I was smoke, into a car and I was a road, into a man and I was a woman. 'What we are doing is very wrong,' he said and was off.” - Robert Desnos

14. “I've wanted to feel pleasure to the point of insanity. They call it getting high, because it's wanting to know that higher level, that godlike level. You want to touch the heavens, you want to feel glory and euphoria, but the trick is it takes work. You can't buy it, you can't get it on a street corner, you can't steal it or inject it or shove it up your ass, you have to earn it.” - Anthony Kiedis

15. “Freedom, where are you? Who holds you back? [...] The mother of wit and pleasure, Oh freedom!” - Manuel Maria Barbosa du Bocage

16. “Remember the botched brothel-visit in L’Education sentimentale and remember its lesson. Do not participate: happiness lies in the imagination, not the act. Pleasure is found first in anticipation, later in memory.” - Julian Barnes

17. “So sweet and delicious do I become,when I am in bed with a manwho, I sense, loves and enjoys me,that the pleasure I bring excels all delight,so the knot of love, however tightit seemed before, is tied tighter still.” - Veronica Franco

18. “Where is our comfort but in the free, uninvolved, finally mysterious beauty and grace of this world that we did not make, that has no price? Where is our sanity but there? Where is our pleasure but in working and resting kindly in the presence of this world? (pg. 215, Economy and Pleasure)” - Wendell Berry

19. “The pleasures of writing correspond exactly to the pleasures of reading” - Vladimir Nabokov

20. “Jeremy Bentham startled the world many years ago by stating in effect that if the amount of pleasure obtained from each be equal there is nothing to choose between poetry and push-pin. Since few people now know what push-pin is, I may explain that it is a child's game in which one player tries to push his pin across that of another player, and if he succeeds and then is able by pressing down on the two pins with the ball of his thumb to lift them off the table he wins possession of his opponent's pin. [...] The indignant retort to Bentham's statement was that spiritual pleasures are obviously higher than physical pleasures. But who say so? Those who prefer spiritual pleasures. They are in a miserable minority, as they acknowledge when they declare that the gift of aesthetic appreciation is a very rare one. The vast majority of men are, as we know, both by necessity and choice preoccupied with material considerations. Their pleasures are material. They look askance at those who spent their lives in the pursuit of art. That is why they have attached a depreciatory sense to the word aesthete, which means merely one who has a special appreciation of beauty. How are we going to show that they are wrong? How are we going to show that there is something to choose between poetry and push-pin? I surmise that Bentham chose push-pin for its pleasant alliteration with poetry. Let us speak of lawn tennis. It is a popular game which many of us can play with pleasure. It needs skill and judgement, a good eye and a cool head. If I get the same amount of pleasure out of playing it as you get by looking at Titian's 'Entombment of Christ' in the Louvre, by listening to Beethoven's 'Eroica' or by reading Eliot's 'Ash Wednesday', how are you going to prove that your pleasure is better and more refined than mine? Only, I should say, by manifesting that this gift you have of aesthetic appreciation has a moral effect on your character.” - W. Somerset Maugham

21. “Of four infernal rivers that disgorge/ Into the burning Lake their baleful streams;/Abhorred Styx the flood of deadly hate,/Sad Acheron of sorrow, black and deep;/Cocytus, nam'd of lamentation loud/ Heard on the rueful stream; fierce Phlegethon/ Whose waves of torrent fire inflame with rage./ Far off from these a slow and silent stream,/ Lethe the River of Oblivion rolls/ Her wat'ry Labyrinth whereof who drinks,/ Forthwith his former state and being forgets,/ Forgets both joy and grief, pleasure and pain.” - John Milton

22. “And he, like many jaded people, had few pleasures left in life save good food and drink.” - Honoré de Balzac

23. “a joy that hurts with sadnessa sadness that is pleasurablea pleasure full of terrora terror that excitesan excitement that calmsa calmness that frightens.” - Aidan Chambers

24. “The things that brought me the most comfort now were too small to list. Raspberries in cream. Sparrows with cocked heads. Shadows of bare limbs making for sidewalk filigrees. Roses past their prime with their petals loose about them. The shouts of children at play in the neighborhood, Ginger Rogers on the black-and-white screen.” - Elizabeth Berg

25. “Why had peace given place so soon to turmoil? To two separate solitudes? Because peace had been without thought? Without...integrity?How could she have felt like that without love?Was love essential?Did it even exist - the love she had dreamed of her life?If it did, it was too late now for her to find it.Must she make do with this instead, then?Only this?Pleasure without love?” - Mary Balogh

26. “That pleasure which is at once the most pure, the most elevating and the most intense, is derived, I maintain, from the contemplation of the beautiful.” - Edgar Allan Poe

27. “Consider the capacity of the human body for pleasure. Sometimes, it is pleasant to eat, to drink, to see, to touch, to smell, to hear, to make love. The mouth. The eyes. The fingertips, The nose. The ears. The genitals. Our voluptific faculties (if you will forgive me the coinage) are not exclusively concentrated here. The whole body is susceptible to pleasure, but in places there are wells from which it may be drawn up in greater quantity. But not inexhaustibly. How long is it possible to know pleasure? Rich Romans ate to satiety, and then purged their overburdened bellies and ate again. But they could not eat for ever. A rose is sweet, but the nose becomes habituated to its scent. And what of the most intense pleasures, the personality-annihilating ecstasies of sex? I am no longer a young man; even if I chose to discard my celibacy I would surely have lost my stamina, re-erecting in half-hours where once it was minutes. And yet if youth were restored to me fully, and I engaged again in what was once my greatest delight – to be fellated at stool by nymphet with mouth still blood-heavy from the necessary precautions – what then? What if my supply of anodontic premenstruals were never-ending, what then? Surely, in time, I should sicken of it.“Even if I were a woman, and could string orgasm on orgasm like beads on a necklace, in time I should sicken of it. Do you think Messalina, in that competition of hers with a courtesan, knew pleasure as much on the first occasion as the last? Impossible.“Yet consider.“Consider pain.“Give me a cubic centimeter of your flesh and I could give you pain that would swallow you as the ocean swallows a grain of salt. And you would always be ripe for it, from before the time of your birth to the moment of your death, we are always in season for the embrace of pain. To experience pain requires no intelligence, no maturity, no wisdom, no slow working of the hormones in the moist midnight of our innards. We are always ripe for it. All life is ripe for it. Always.” - Jesus Ignacio Aldapuerta

28. “‎Pleasure is wild and sweet. She likes purple flowers. She loves the sun and the wind and the night sky. She carries a silver bowl full of liquid moonlight. She has a cat named Midnight with stars on his paws. Many people mistrust Pleasure, and even more misunderstand her. For a long time I could barely stand to be in ...the same room with her...” - J. Ruth Gendler

29. “Conversation, to take another example, is one of the common pleasures of life, but not all conversation is pleasurable. The stutterer finds talking painful, and the listener is equally pained. Persons who are inhibited in expressing feeling are not good conversationalists. Nothing is more boring than to listen to a person talk in a monotone without feeling. We enjoy a conversation when there is a communication of feeling. We have pleasure in expressing our feelings, and we respond pleasurably to another person's expression of feeling. The voice, like the body, is a medium through which feeling flows, and when this flow occurs in an easy and rhythmic manner, it is a pleasure both to the speaker and listener.” - Alexander Lowen

30. “The kiss intimately relates to the most primitive kind of human contact, which can satisfy all of our needs, like: feeding, enjoying pleasure, tasting, wanting, rejecting, everything we associate with love.” - Mabel Iam

31. “People argue themselves out of their pleasures” - Jude Morgan

32. “Somewhere I’d heard, or invented perhaps, that the only pleasures found during a waning moon are misfortunes in disguise. Superstition aside, I avoid pleasure during the waning or absent moon out of respect for the bounty this world offers me. I profit from great harvests in life and believe in the importance of seasons.” - Roman Payne

33. “A pleasurable woman could cause more harm than miserable one.” - Santosh Kalwar

34. “Perhaps in nearly every joy, as certainly in every pleasure, cruelty has its place.” - Oscar Wilde

35. “I had a moral tutor, but never saw him (the only words of his I remember are 'The three pleasures of life -drinking, smoking, and masturbation')” - Philip Larkin

36. “JACKYour duty as a gentleman calls you back. ALGERNONMy duty as a gentleman has never interfered with my pleasures in the smallest degree.” - Oscar Wilde

37. “Generosity without delicacy, like wit without judgement, generally gives as much pain as pleasure.” - Frances Burney

38. “It's precisely in despair that you find the most intense pleasure, especially if you are already powerfully conscious of the hopelessness of your predicament.” - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

39. “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

40. “Pleasure, I remind myself, is inseparable from its lawfully wedded mate, pain.” - T.C. Boyle

41. “The most total opposite of pleasure is not pain but boredom, for we are willing to risk pain to make a boring life interesting.” - Peter Kreeft

42. “Man was designed in a way in which he must eat in order to give him a solid reason to go to work everyday. This helps to keep him out of trouble. God is wise.” - Criss Jami

43. “Sorrow, terror, anguish, despair itself are often the chosen expressions of an approximation to the highest good. Our sympathy in tragic fiction depends on this principle; tragedy delights by affording a shadow of the pleasure which exists in pain. This is the source also of the melancholy which is inseparable from the sweetest melody. The pleasure that is in sorrow is sweeter than the pleasure of pleasure itself.” - Percy Bysshe Shelley

44. “A man without pleasure is a man without any idea what life is about” - Michael Grant

45. “I'm in love with you," he said quietly."Augustus," I said."I am," he said. He was staring at me, and I could see the corners of his eyes crinkling. "I'm in love with you, and I'm not in the business of denying myself the simple pleasure of saying true things. I'm in love with you, and I know that love is just a shout into the void, and that oblivion is inevitable, and that we're all doomed and that there will come a day when all our labor has been returned to dust, and I know the sun will swallow the only earth we'll ever have, and I am in love with you.” - John Green

46. “May your dreams be gifts from the gods and may you open them with excitement and pleasure.” - Harley King

47. “It was there, in particular, that I confirmed the truth that love, which we cry up as the source of our pleasures, is nothing more than an excuse for them.” - Pierre A.F. Choderlos de Laclos

48. “It is easier for one to take risks and to chase his dreams with a mindset that he has nothing to lose. In this lies the immense passion, the great advantage of avoiding a materialistic, pleasure-filled way of life.” - Criss Jami

49. “when all of life becomes crowded with profound and weighty matters, making time to engage in trivial things becomes an even greater priority.” - Galen Beckett

50. “Think big thoughts but relish small pleasures.” - H. Jackson Brown Jr.

51. “Happiness is the good life that is marked by flourishing well-being, joy, prosperity, peace, satisfaction, and pleasure.” - Ogwo David Emenike

52. “Sex for pleasure, for fun, or even for building relationships is completely absent from our national conversation. Yet taking the joy out of sexuality is a surefire way to ensure not that young women won't have sex, but rather that they'll have it without pleasure.” - Jessica Valenti

53. “I may be permitted, like the doctors, to cure a greater evil by a less, for I shall not fall seriously in love with the young widow, I think, nor she with me - that's certain - but if I find a little pleasure in her society I may surely be allowed to seek it; and if the star of her divinity be bright enough to dim the lustre of Eliza's, so much the better, but I scarcely can think it” - Anne Brontë

54. “If you would really study my pleasure, mother, you must consider your own comfort and convenience a little more than you do.” - Anne Brontë

55. “The selfishness of an age that has devoted itself to the mere cult of pleasure has tainted the whole human race with an error that makes all our acts more or less lies against God.” - Thomas Merton

56. “But there must be some pleasure in condemning everything--in perceiving faults where others think they see beauties.''You mean there is pleasure in having no pleasure.” - Voltaire

57. “The pleasures arising from thinking and learning will make us think and learn all the more. 1153a 23” - Aristotle

58. “Happiness is pleasure without regret” - Leo Tolstoy

59. “It bombarded her with instant pleasure, instant pain and instant arousal, fact and fiction all mixed up and blurred together to create an Image. ” - Ruth Harris

60. “Senses empower limitations, senses expand vision within borders, senses promote understanding through pleasure.” - Dejan Stojanovic

61. “Without pleasure there is no sight or measure.” - Dejan Stojanovic

62. “To a man, sex is the ultimate expression of love. It is pure pleasure. But to a woman there exists something greater than pleasure―gestures of adoration. A gentle caress on the cheek, an attentive smile, a soft kiss while swept away in a slow dance, the whispered words 'You're beautiful'―these are the tokens of love that women cherish.” - Richelle E. Goodrich

63. “The greatest pleasure is not - say - sex or geometry. It is just understanding. And if you can get people to understand their own humanity - well, that's the job of the writer.” - William Golding

64. “There are men who have themselves whipped simply to increase their sexual pleasure. These, in contrast with true masochists, regard flagellation as a means to an end.” - Richard Freiherr von Krafft-Ebing

65. “Go where the pain is, go where the pleasure is.” - Anne Rice

66. “What is another person's pleasure is another's poison.” - Cassandra Clare

67. “Before the beginning of yearsThere came to the making of manTime, with a gift of tears;Grief, with a glass that ran;Pleasure, with pain for leaven;Summer, with flowers that fell;Remembrance, fallen from heaven,And madness risen from hell;Strength without hands to smite;Love that endures for a breath;Night, the shadow of light,And Life, the shadow of death.” - Algernon Charles Swinburne

68. “The overwhelming noise we live with has made a fundamental pleasure like sex somehow less exciting, less satisfying, than it was for our libidinous forefathers and mothers. It seems to me that for sex and other pleasures to be enjoyed to the fullest, a certain contemplative quality to life must be present. If you doubt this imagine yourself for a moment having sex. Now imagine you wished to increase the pleasure you were feeling, feel it more intensely. What might you do? Well one of the things you'd probably do is close your eyes. What this does of course is shut out other stimuli. The visual quiet increases your sensual enjoyment and you concentrate more fully on the pleasure. The same is true for the removal of auditory noise as well. Well my feeling is that the average person has a much harder time doing this today than they would have decades ago. Today you close your eyes and shut off Television but the noise persists. It's part of our fabric now, our biology, and all other pleasures including sex are diminished as a result. We don't notice this derogation by the way and sex still feels great, don't get me wrong, but I think the difference is there nonetheless. Like the difference between seeing breasts when you're thirty as opposed to when you were thirteen.” - Sergio De La Pava

69. “Would you agree," he said, "that man's sole duty is to produce as much pleasure as possible?""Only if the pleasure produced is equivalent to the diminution of pain." My father crossed his arms. "And only if one man's pleasure is as important as any other's.” - Susan Hubbard

70. “Ask him why there are hypocrites in the world.''Because it is hard to bear the happiness of others.''When are we happy?''When we desire nothing and realize that possession is only momentary, and so are forever playing.''What is regret?''To realize that one has spent one's life worrying about the future.''What is sorrow?''To long for the past.''What is the highest pleasure?''To hear a good story.” - Vikram Chandra

71. “Materialism, attachment to things of the world, includes pride. Many religious people suffer from pride: taking pleasure or even delight in being good, or religious.” - Idries Shah

72. “Life is more than love and pleasure,I came to dig for treasure.If you want to play, you gotta pay,You know it's always been that wayWe all came digging for treasure.” - Stephen King

73. “Epicurus said you should live for pleasure - adding that nothing brings more pleasure than a little sun and a glass of water. It is on this principle that our conjugal existence has rested for three years, devoted to making love, reading, eating excellent meals, spending a few days in a nice hotel by the sea, visiting out friends (not very many, all without children), going to concerts and movies, sleeping, cultivating our garden.” - Benoît Duteurtre

74. “...A mother is the one who fills your heart in the first place. She teaches you the nature of happiness: what is the right amount, what is too much, and the kind that makes you want more of what is bad for you. A mother helps her baby flex her first feelings of pleasure. She teaches her when to later exercise restraint, or to take squealing joy in recognizing the fluttering leaves of the gingko tree, to sense a quieter but more profound satisfaction in chancing upon an everlasting pine. A mother enables you to realize that there are different levels of beauty and therein lie the sources of pleasure, some of which are popular and ordinary, and thus of brief value, and others of which are difficult and rare, and hence worth pursuing.” - Amy Tan

75. “The Christian doctrine of suffering explains, I believe, a very curious fact about the world we live in. The settled happiness and security which we all desire, God withholds from us by the nature of the world: but joy, pleasure, and merriment He has scattered broadcast...The security we crave would teach us to rest our hearts in this world and oppose an obstacle to our return to God...Our Father refreshes us on the journey with some pleasant inns, but will not encourage us to mistake them for home.” - C.S. Lewis

76. “Of an artistic temperament, I deny that I am; yet I must possess something of the artist's faculty of making the most of present pleasure.” - Charlotte Brontë

77. “The enemy for the fanatic is pleasure, which makes it extremely important to continue to indulge in pleasure. Dance madly. That is how you get rid of terrorism.” - Salman Rushdie

78. “Lust for possession and greed has ravaged the soul of humanity like a great cancer, metastasizing throughout society in the form of a nouveau post-human, consumer hedonism.” - Bryant McGill

79. “Why? What kind of man would pleasure his woman by hurting her.' Angus paced across the path. ''Tis a man's duty, nay, his privilege, to give his woman all the pleasure she can bear. She should be panting and writhing with pleasure.'Emma remained silent, staring at him. Did she not believe him?He walked toward her. 'A real man would take all night if need be to make sure his woman was fully sated. She should be screaming that she canna endure any more.'Emma's eyes widened.'It should be a man's greatest pleasure to see his woman shuddering in the throes of passion.'She took a deep breath and shifted her weight from one foot to another.He paced back and forth. 'Only when she is begging for him should a man see to his own needs. And he should never, ever harm her.' He stopped in front of her 'Am I totally wrong in this?''No,' she squeaked.” - Kerrelyn Sparks