| |
| All fits of pleasure are balanced by an equal degree of pain or languor; it is like spending this year part of the next year's revenues | | Jonathan Swift | |
| All natural goods perish. Riches take wings; fame is a breath; love is a cheat; youth and health and pleasure vanish. | | William James | |
| An inordinate passion for pleasure is the secret of remaining young | | Oscar Wilde | |
| Do not bite at the bait of pleasure, till you know there is no hook beneath it. | | Thomas Jefferson | |
| For let me tell you, that the more the pleasures of the body fade away, the greater to me is the pleasure and charm of conversation | | Plato | |
| If we could all live solitary and without labor, we could all enjoy this ecstasy of independence; since we cannot, its delights are only available to madmen and dictators | | Bertrand Russell | |
| |
| |
| It gives me great pleasure indeed to see the stubbornness of an incorrigible nonconformist warmly acclaimed | | Albert Einstein | |
| It is no less a proof of eminence to have many enemies than many friends | | Samuel Johnson | |
| It is only a poor sort of happiness that could ever come by caring very much about our own pleasures. We can only have the highest happiness such as goes along with being a great man, by having wide thoughts and much feeling for the rest of the world as well as ourselves. | | George Eliot | |
| It seems to me that if you or I must choose between two courses of thought or action, we should remember our dying and try so to live that our death brings no pleasure on the world. | | John Steinbeck | |
| 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. | | Samuel Johnson | |
| |
| |
| No verse can give pleasure for long, nor last, that is written by drinkers of water. | | Horace | |
| Pleasure is continually disappointed, reduced, deflated, in favor of strong, noble values: Truth, Death, Progress, Struggle, Joy, etc. Its victorious rival is Desire: we are always being told about Desire, never about Pleasure. | | Roland Barthes | |
| Pleasure is the bait of sin | | Plato | |
| Pleasure is the greatest incentive to evil. | | Plato | |
| Pleasure is the object, duty and the goal of all rational creatures. | | Voltaire | |
