The secret of success is learning how to use pain and pleasure instead of having pain and pleasure use you. If you do that you're in control of your life. If you don't life controls you.

The knowledge and understanding of the world which science gives us and the magnificent opportunity which it extends to us to control and use the world for the extension of our pleasure in it has never been greater than it now is.

Take from the philosopher the pleasure of being heard and his desire for knowledge ceases.

There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge.

Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred jealousy boastfulness disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence. In other words it is war minus the shooting.

The ability to take pleasure in one's life is a skill and is a kind of intelligence. So intelligence is a hard thing to evaluate and it manifests itself in so many different ways. I do think the ability to know how to live a life and not be miserable is a sign of that.

The pleasures of the imagination are as it were only drawings and models which are played with by poor people who cannot afford the real thing.

The imagination is the spur of delights... all depends upon it it is the mainspring of everything now is it not by means of the imagination one knows joy? Is it not of the imagination that the sharpest pleasures arise?

Everything that is new or uncommon raises a pleasure in the imagination because it fills the soul with an agreeable surprise gratifies its curiosity and gives it an idea of which it was not before possessed.

I think that different pleasures work for different readers - a friend of mine won't read anything that's not a cardiovascular sort of page-turner. I tend to care less about plot but I'm a sucker for humor and strangeness.

Before I do a play I say that I hope it's going to be for as short a time as possible but once you do it it is a paradoxical pleasure. One evening out of two there are five minutes of a miracle and for those five minutes you want to do it again and again. It's like a drug.

The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure but from hope to hope.

I hope that posterity will judge me kindly not only as to the things which I have explained but also to those which I have intentionally omitted so as to leave to others the pleasure of discovery.

If my world were to cave in tomorrow I would look back on all the pleasures excitements and worthwhilenesses I have been lucky enough to have had. Not the sadness not my miscarriages or my father leaving home but the joy of everything else. It will have been enough.

Happy happy Christmas that can win us back to the delusions of our childhood days recall to the old man the pleasures of his youth and transport the traveler back to his own fireside and quiet home!

Religions which condemn the pleasures of sense drive men to seek the pleasures of power. Throughout history power has been the vice of the ascetic.

The first draught serveth for health the second for pleasure the third for shame and the fourth for madness.

Fame and power are the objects of all men. Even their partial fruition is gained by very few and that too at the expense of social pleasure health conscience life.

According to your sympathy you will take pleasure in your own happiness or in the happiness of other people but it is always your own happiness you seek.

Life is made up of small pleasures. Happiness is made up of those tiny successes. The big ones come too infrequently. And if you don't collect all these tiny successes the big ones don't really mean anything.

Pleasure only starts once the worm has got into the fruit to become delightful happiness must be tainted with poison.

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.

It is the 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.

Objects we ardently pursue bring little happiness when gained most of our pleasures come from unexpected sources.