This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"Though selfishness hath defiled the whole man, yet sensual pleasure is the chief part of its interest, and therefore by the senses it commonly works, and these are the doors and the windows by which iniquity entereth the soul." - Richard Baxter
"You have to live on twenty-four hours of daily time. Out of it you have to spin health, pleasure, money, content, respect, and the evolution of your immortal soul. Its right use, its most effective use, is a matter of the highest urgency and of the most thrilling actuality. All depends on that. Your happiness - the elusive prize that you are all clutching for, my friends! - depends on that!" - Arnold Bennett, fully Enoch Thomas Arnold Bennett
"Honest work bears a lovely face for it is the father of pleasure and the mother of good fortune. It is the keystone of prosperity and the sire of fame. And best of all, work is relief from sorrow and the handmaiden of happiness." - Eugene P. Bertin, fully Eugene Peter Bertin
"It is a 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. As a matter of experience, we find that true happiness comes in seeking other things, in the manifold activities of life, in the healthful outgoing of all human powers." - Hugh Black
"Industry is not only the instrument of improvement, but the foundation of pleasure. He who is a stranger to it may possess, but cannot enjoy, for it is labor only which give relish to pleasure. It is the indispensable condition of possessing a sound mind in a sound body, and is the appointed vehicle of every good to man." -
"If you think of the infinite resources of eternity you have little cause to take pleasure in any continuation of your name." - Boethius, fully Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius NULL
"Liberty is to the collective body, what health is to every individual body. Without health no pleasure can be tasted by man; without liberty, no happiness can be enjoyed by society." - Henry Bolingbroke, Henry IV of England
"Liberty is to the collective body, what health is to every individual body. Without health no pleasure can be tasted by man; without liberty, no happiness can be enjoyed by society." - William Bolitho, pen name for Charles William Ryall
"Pleasure is the flower that fades; remembrance is the lasting perfume." - Stanislas de Boufflers, fully Marquis Stanislas-Jean de Boufflers, Chevalier de Boufflers
"There is no sense of weariness like that which closes a day of eager and unintermitted pursuit of pleasure. The apple is eaten and the core sticks in the throat. Expectation has given way to ennui, and appetite to satiety." - Christian Nestell Bovee
"In compelling man to eat that he may live, Nature gives an appetite to invite him, and pleasure to reward him." - Brillat-Savarin, fully Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin NULL
"If you suppress the exorbitant love of pleasure and money, idle curiosity, iniquitous pursuits and wanton mirth, what a stillness would there be in the great cities! The necessaries of life do not occasion at most a third part of the hurry." - Jean de La Bruyère
"The most delicate, the most sensible, of all pleasures consists in promoting the pleasure of others." - Jean de La Bruyère
"A life of pleasure makes even the strongest mind frivolous at last." - Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton, fully Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, Lord Lytton
"Beware of suretyship for thy best friend. He that payeth another man’s debt seeketh his own decay. But if thou canst not otherwise choose, rather lend the money thyself upon good bonds, although thou borrow it; so shalt thou secure thyself, and pleasure thy friend." - William Cecil, Lord Burghley, 1st Baron Burghley, also Lord William Cecil Burleigh
"The rule of my life is to make business a pleasure, and pleasure my business." - Aaron Burr
"Nature has made occupation a necessity to us; society makes a duty; habit may make it a pleasure." - Capelle NULL
"We smile at the ignorance of the savage who cuts down the tree in order to reach its fruit; but the same blunder is made by every person who is over eager and impatient in the pursuit of pleasure." - William Ellery Channing
"For a short pleasure, long remembrance." - Randle Cotgrave
"Enthusiasm is the element of success in everything. It is the light that leads and the strength that lifts men on and up in the great struggles of scientific pursuits and of professional labor. It robs endurance of difficulty, and makes a pleasure of duty." - William Croswell Doane
"Error is a supposition that pleasure and pain, that intelligence, substance, life, are existent in matter. Error is neither Mind nor one of Mind's faculties. Error is the contradiction of Truth. Error is a belief without understanding. Error is unreal because untrue. It is that which stemma to be and is not. If error were true, its truth would be error, and we should have a self-evident absurdity namely, erroneous truth. Thus we should continue to lose the standard of Truth." - Mary Baker Eddy
"Socrates taught that true felicity is not to be derived from external possessions, but from wisdom, which consists in the knowledge and practice of virtue; that the cultivation of virtuous manners is necessarily attended with pleasure as well as profit; that the honest man alone is happy; and that it is absurd to attempt to separate things which are in nature so closely united as virtue and interest." - William Enfield, aka "The Enquirer"
"Many a man thinks he is buying pleasure, when he is really selling himself a slave to it." - Benjamin Franklin
"The honest man pains, and then enjoys pleasures, the knave takes pleasure, and then suffers pain." - Benjamin Franklin
"Who pleasure gives, shall joy receive." - Benjamin Franklin
"American housewives have not had their brains shot away, nor are they schizophrenic in the clinical sense. But if... the fundamental human drive is not the urge for pleasure or the satisfaction of biological needs, but the need to grow and realize one’s full potential, their comfortable, empty, purposeless days are indeed cause for a nameless terror." - Betty Friedan
"He who wishes to exert a useful influence must be careful to insult nothing. Let him not be troubled by what seems absurd, but concentrate his energies to the creation of what is good. He must not demolish, but build. He must raise temples where mankind may come and partake of the purest pleasure." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
"As there is no pleasure in military life for a soldier who fears death, so there is no independence in civil existence for the an who has an overpowering dread of solitude." - Philip G. Hamerton, fully Philip Gilbert Hamerton
"But it is not hard work which is dreary; it is superficial work. That is always boring in the long run, and it has always seemed strange to me that in our endless discussions about education so little stress is ever laid on the pleasure of becoming an educated person, the enormous interest it adds to life. To be able to be caught up into the world of thought - that is to be educated." - Edith Hamilton
"Set happiness before you as an end, no matter in what guise of wealth, or fame, or oblivion even, and you will not attain it. But renounce it and seek the pleasure of God, and that instant is the birth of you own." - Arthur Sherburne Hardy
"Happiness is the legitimate fruitage of love and service. Set happiness before you as an end, no matter in what guise of wealth, or fame, or oblivion even, and you will not attain it. But renounce it and seek the pleasure of God, and that instant is the birth of your own." - Arthur Sherburne Hardy
"I have ever gained the most profit, and the most pleasure also, from the books which have made me think the most: and, when the difficulties have once been overcome, these are the books which have struck the deepest root, not only in my memory and understanding, but likewise in my affections." - Julius Charles Hare (1795-1855) and his brother Augustus William Hare
"Every affection of the mind that is attended with either pain or pleasure, hope or fear, is the cause of an agitation whose influence extends to the heart, and there induces change from the natural constitution, in the temperature, the pulse and the rest, which impairing all nutrition in its source and abating the powers at large, it is no wonder that various forms of incurable disease in the extremities and in the trunk are the consequence, inasmuch as in such circumstances the whole body labors under the effects of vitiated nutrition and want of native heat." - William Harvey
"The chief pleasure (in eating) does not consist in costly seasoning or exquisite flavor, but in yourself. Do you seek for sauce by sweating." - Horace, full name Quintus Horatius Flaccus NULL
"Those who are unacquainted with the world take pleasure in the intimacy of great men; those who are wiser dread the consequences." - Horace, full name Quintus Horatius Flaccus NULL
"Happiness is a thing of gravity. It seeks for hearts of bronze, and carves itself there slowly; pleasure startles it away by tossing flowers to it. Joy's smile is much more close to tears than it is to laughter." - Victor Hugo
"Get pleasure out of life... as much as you can. No one ever died from pleasure." - Sol Hurok, fully Solomon Isiaevich Hurok; born Solomon Izrailevich Gurkov
"How easy it is for one benevolent being to diffuse pleasure around him; and how truly is a kind heart a fountain of gladness, making everything in its vicinity to freshen into smiles!" - Washington Irving
"Many have no happier moments than those that they pass in solitude, abandoned to their imagination, which sometimes puts scepters in their hands or miters on their heads, shifts the scene of pleasure with endless variety, bids all the forms of beauty sparkle before them, and gluts them with every change of visionary luxury." -
"Wealth is nothing in itself; it is not useful but when it departs from us; its value is found only in that which it can purchase. As to corporeal enjoyment, money can neither open new avenues of pleasure, nor block up the passages of anguish. Disease and infirmity still continue to torture and enfeeble, perhaps exasperated by luxury, or promoted by softness. With respect to the mind, it has rarely been observed that wealth contributes much to quicken the discernment or elevate the imagination, but may, by hiring flattery, or laying diligence asleep, confirm error and harden stupidity." -
"I who am blind can give one hint to those who see - one admonition to those who would make full use of the gift of sight: Use your eyes as if tomorrow you would be stricken blind. And the same method can be applied to the other senses. Hear the music of voices, the song of a bird, the mighty strains of an orchestra, as if you would be stricken deaf tomorrow. Touch each object yhou want to touch as if tomorrow your tactile sense would fail. Smell the perfume of flowers, taste with relish each morsel, as if tomorrow you could never smell and taste again. Make the most of every sense; glory in all facets of pleasure and beauty which the world reveals to you through the several means of contact which Nature provides. But of all the senses, sight must be the most delightful." -
"The mind is guilty of adultery even if it merely pictures to itself a vision of carnal pleasure." - Lactantius, fully Lucius Caecilius Firmianus Lactantius NULL