92 Pleasure Quotes To Enjoy

In a fast-paced world often filled with stress and responsibilities, it's crucial to pause and relish moments of joy and satisfaction. Whether it's the simple pleasure of a morning coffee, the thrill of a new adventure, or the warmth of time spent with loved ones, pleasure comes in many forms and should be celebrated. To inspire you to seek out and savor life's delightful moments, we've curated a collection of the top 92 pleasure quotes. These quotes serve as gentle reminders to appreciate the beauty and happiness in the everyday. Enjoy and let these words bring a smile to your face and a touch of joy to your heart.

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. “You must learn some of my philosophy. Think only of the past as its remembrance gives you pleasure.” - Jane Austen

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

4. “I finally figured out the only reason to be alive is to enjoy it.” - Rita Mae Brown

5. “Old boys have their playthings as well as young ones; the difference is only in the price.” - Benjamin Franklin

6. “It is clear that men accept an immediate pain rather than an immediate pleasure, but only because they expect a greater pleasure in the future. Often the pleasure is illusory, but their error in calculation is no refutation of the rule. You are puzzled because you cannot get over the idea that pleasures are only of the sense; but, child, a man who dies for his country dies because he likes it as surely as a man eats pickled cabbage because he likes it.” - W. Somerset Maugham

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

8. “I set out to discover the why of it, and to transform my pleasure into knowledge.” - Charles Baudelaire

9. “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

10. “Kiss a lover, Dance a measure, Find your name And buried treasure. Face your life, It's pain, It's pleasure, Leave no path untaken.” - Neil Gaiman

11. “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

12. “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

13. “Seek for no meaning in it; it has none. What meaning is there in pain and pleasure? They are twins; that is all we know. Seek no meaning in anything you see here. Images, ideas, flashes of purpose will peer out in all our ways and deeds, but there is no intention here below. Is there any intention anywhere?” - John Davidson

14. “The art of music is good, for the reason, among others, that it produces pleasure; but what proof is it possible to give that pleasure is good? If, then, it is asserted that there is a comprehensive formula, including all things which are in themselves good, and that whatever else is good, is not so as an end, but as a mean, the formula may be accepted or rejected, but is not a subject of what is commonly understood by proof.” - John Stuart Mill

15. “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

16. “The pleasure of eating should be an extensive pleasure, not that of the mere gourmet. People who know the garden in which their vegetables have grown and know that the garden is healthy will remember the beauty of the growing plants, perhaps in the dewy first light of morning when gardens are at their best. Such a memory involves itself with the food and is one of the pleasures of eating. (pg. 326, The Pleasures of Eating)” - Wendell Berry

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

18. “The pleasure of criticizing takes away from us the pleasure of being moved by some very fine things.” - Jean de La Bruyère

19. “The main question to a novel is -- did it amuse? were you surprised at dinner coming so soon? did you mistake eleven for ten? were you too late to dress? and did you sit up beyond the usual hour? If a novel produces these effects, it is good; if it does not -- story, language, love, scandal itself cannot save it. It is only meant to please; and it must do that or it does nothing.” - Sydney Smith

20. “The will has no overall purpose, aims at no highest good, and can never be satisfied. Although it is our essence, it strikes us as an alien agency within, striving for life and procreation blindly, mediated only secondarily by consciousness. Instinctive sexuality is at our core, interfering constantly with the life of the intellect. To be an individual expression of this will is to lead a life of continual desire, deficiency, and suffering. Pleasure or satisfaction exists only relative to a felt lack; it is negative, merely the cessation of an episode of striving or suffering, and has no value of itself. Nothing we can achieve by conscious act of will alters the will to life within us. There is no free will. Human actions, as part of the natural order, are determined [....] As individual parts of the empirical world we are ineluctably pushed through life by a force inside us which is not of our choosing, which gives rise to needs and desires we can never fully satisfy, and is without ultimate purpose. Schopenhauer concludes that it would have been better not to exist—and that the world itself is something whose existence we should deplore rather than celebrate.” - Christopher Janaway

21. “Pleasure cannot be shared; like Pain, it can only be experienced or inflicted, and when we give Pleasure to our Lovers or bestow Charity upon the Needy, we do so, not to gratify the object of our Benevolence, but only ourselves. For the Truth is that we are kind for the same reason as we are cruel, in order that we may enhance the sense of our own Power....” - Aldous Huxley

22. “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

23. “What destroys a man more quickly than to work, think and feel without inner necessity, without any deep personal desire, without pleasure - as a mere automaton of duty?” - Friedrich Nietzsche

24. “Pleasure is the only thing one should live for, nothing ages like happiness.” - Oscar Wilde

25. “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

26. “The fiery force is nothing more than the life force as we know it. It is the flame of desire and love, of sex and beauty, of pleasure and joy as we consume and are consumed, as we burn with pleasure and burn out in time.” - Harold Norse

27. “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

28. “His distress and pleasure mixed and married, giving birth to several anxious children.” - Ann Brashares

29. “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

30. “‎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

31. “We are so constituted that we can gain intense pleasure only from the contrast, and only very little from the condition itself.” - Sigmund Freud

32. “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

33. “Every moment has its pleasures and its hope.” - Jane Austen

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

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

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

37. “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

38. “There is a cosmic law which says that every satisfaction must be paid for with a dissatisfaction.” - G.I. Gurdjieff

39. “We live in one of the few epochs of humanity where life isn't just a painful cycle of toil, fatigue, and collapse. Now pleasure gyrates us through those stages.” - Bauvard

40. “Yes, faith; it is my cousin's duty to make curtsy and say 'Father, as it please you.' But yet for all that, cousin, let him be a handsome fellow, or else make another curtsy and say 'Father, as it please me.” - William Shakespeare

41. “Close your eyes and turn your face into the wind.Feel it sweep along your skin in an invisible ocean of exultation.Suddenly, you know you are alive.” - Vera Nazarian

42. “And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time’s malleability.” - Julian Barnes

43. “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

44. “When you have wit of your own, it's a pleasure to credit other people for theirs.” - Criss Jami

45. “On se prépare à la jouissance du siècle, et, le moment venu, elle a un goût de Fernet Branca. Sur ce point comme sur quelques autres, Julia a raison : ne jamais investir dans la promesse du plaisir. Tout de suite ou pas du tout.” - Daniel Pennac

46. “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

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

48. “I was still young and the whole world of beauty was opening before me, my own officious obstructions were often swept aside and, startled into self-forgetfulness, I again tasted Joy. ... One thing, however, I learned, which has since saved me from many popular confusions of mind. I came to know by experience that it is not a disguise of sexual desire. ... I repeatedly followed that path - to the end. And at the end one found pleasure; which immediately resulted in the discovery that pleasure (whether that pleasure or any other) was not what you had been looking for. No moral question was involved; I was at this time as nearly nonmoral on that subject as a human creature can be. The frustration did not consist in finding a "lower" pleasure instead of a "higher." It was the irrelevance of the conclusion that marred it. ... You might as well offer a mutton chop to a man who is dying of thirst as offer sexual pleasure to the desire I am speaking of. ... Joy is not a substitute for sex; sex is very often a substitute for Joy. I sometimes wonder whether all pleasures are not substitutes for Joy.” - C.S. Lewis

49. “If the portraits of our absent friends are pleasant to us, which renew our memory of them and relieve our regret for their absence by a false and empty consolation, how much more pleasant are letters which bring us the written characters of the absent friend.” - Héloïse d'Argenteuil

50. “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

51. “Until-as often happened during those first months travel, whenever I would feel such happiness-my guilt alarm went off. I heard my ex-husband's voice speaking disdainfully in my ear: So this is what you gave up everything for? This is why you gutted our entire life together? For a few stalks of asparagus and an Italian newspaper? I replied aloud to him: "First of all," I said, "I'm very sorry, but this isn't your business anymore. And secondly, to answer you question...yes.” - Elizabeth Gilbert

52. “The public never appears to tire of endless courses of strawberries and cream, and the theory that you run the risk of boring people with endless photo montages of the Chelsea Pensioners in their dress reds, or close-ups of a Pimm's Cup sprouting all kinda of flora, has yet to be proven. People like Wimbledon in the same way they like blue jeans or even their own spouses: for the pleasure yielded by their reliable sameness.” - Peter Bodo

53. “If hot food is they key to maintaining an expedition's stamina, then low grade gut-rot alcohol is the key to sustaining its sense of pleasure.” - Tahir Shah

54. “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

55. “So she thoroughly taught him that one cannot take pleasure without giving pleasure, and that every gesture, every caress, every touch, every glance, every last bit of the body has its secret, which brings happiness to the person who knows how to wake it. She taught him that after a celebration of love the lovers should not part without admiring each other, without being conquered or having conquered, so that neither is bleak or glutted or has the bad feeling of being used or misused.” - Hermann Hesse

56. “Life is a balanced system of learning and evolution. Whether pleasure or pain; every situation in your life serves a purpose. It is up to us to recognize what that purpose could be.” - Steve Maraboli

57. “Each one of us is left to choose our own quality of life and take pleasure where we find it with the understanding that, like Mom used to say, sooner or later something's gonna get you.” - David Sedaris

58. “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

59. “Pleasure represents a great good but also a grave danger.” - Philip Yancey

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

61. “The stoic contemplates fallen leaves; the epicure rakes them into a loveseat.” - Bauvard

62. “In the world of animals, pain serves an equivocal role. Parental nips and swipes are common tools in upbringing. And socially, pain is sometimes used to maintain hierarchies of dominance. But this animal use of pain seems somewhat restrained, at least in contrast with the human situation. Here the capacity for pain is often used to systematically exploit and oppress at intensities often far beyond those seen in the behaviour of our nearest primate relatives. At the same time, at least in western culture, pain is rarely used for pleasure. Is it little wonder that all pain is viewed as intrinsically evil? Or that the pain-pleasure of leatherspace has been labelled torture?” - Geoff Mains

63. “We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must havethe stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthlessfurnace of this world. To make injustice the onlymeasure of our attention is to praise the Devil.” - Jack Gilbert

64. “You are speaking...as if the pleasure were one thing and the memory another. It is all one thing... what you call remembering is the last part of the pleasure.” - C.S. Lewis

65. “to read is to surrender oneself to an endless displacement of curiosity and desire from one sentence to another, from one action to another, from one level of a text to another. The text unveils itself before us, but never allows itself to be possessed; and instead of trying to possess it we should take pleasure in its teasing” - David Lodge

66. “Don't listen to anyone. Trust what gives you pleasure. Trust the emotions. If you love something but can't explain why, that's enough” - Calice Becker

67. “The sense of love should not like coffee, which only gives pleasure to the enjoy. But it must be like oranges which not only give pleasure but also freshness.” - Isra

68. “The great pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do.” - Walter Bagehot

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

70. “But let no one imagine that we were mere ascetics. There is no more complex pleasure than thought, and it was to thought that we delivered ourselves over.” - Jorge Luis Borges

71. “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

72. “In life there are two things which are dependable. The pleasures of the flesh and the pleasures of literature.” - Sei Shonagon

73. “There had been an attempt to humiliate him. It had not succeeded. He had paid, but pain, like pleasure, has no duration. Pride was an entity more persistent.” - Jack Vance

74. “Ακόμη δε συνάντησα κανέναν που να αγαπούσε την αρετή περισσότερο από την ηδονή.” - Κομφούκιος

75. “Desires are but pain and torment, and enjoyment is sweet because it delivers us from them.” - Giacomo Casanova

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

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

78. “I have a sense that God is unfair and preferentially punishes his weak, his dumb, his fat, his lazy. I believe he takes more pleasure in his perfect creatures, and cheers them on like a brainless dad as they run roughshod over the rest of us. He gives us a need for love, and no way to get any. He gives us a desire to be liked, and personal attributes that make us utterly unlikable. Having placed his flawed and needy children in a world of exacting specifications, he deducts the difference between what we have and what we need from our hearts and our self-esteem and our mental health.” - George Saunders

79. “As long as it still hurts, it isn’t love yet.” - Silvia Hartmann

80. “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

81. “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

82. “He soon recognized the fact that the stimulus proceeded from the idea to be in the power of a woman rather than from the act of violence itself.” - Richard Freiherr von Krafft-Ebing

83. “Their pleasures are fierce and their sleep impenetrable. And they know that the body has a soul in which the soul has no part.” - Albert Camus

84. “The ' pleasure' of being drunk is obviously the pleasure of escaping from the responsibility of Consciousness.” - Ayn Rand

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

86. “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

87. “I don’t regret for a single moment having lived for pleasure. I did it to the full, as one should do everything that one does. There was no pleasure I did not experience.” - Oscar Wilde

88. “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

89. “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

90. “It happened on a Valentine night.Chris was an expert panther, a James Bond. Sarah was a lamb, a Virgin Mary. It was a night of mixed feelings and inner conflict. In her flesh she felt walking on liquid gold; but in her mind, heart and soul she could not help but hate herself for partaking of this “forbidden fruit” of pleasure. Not long was the thrill gone that her soul went sinking in the quick sands of condemnation, “did you have to do it?” - Moffat Machingura

91. “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

92. “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