Honore de Balzac Quotes

Do you think it takes true pain to experience true pleasure?

Whenever we experience an event, whether we're visiting the dentist or taking a dream vacation, our consciousness registers that experience internally on a spectrum with great pain at one end and extreme pleasure at the other. Once completed, the memory of that experience is tagged to either pain or pleasure, and it continues to exist in our bodymind.

There's a certain satisfaction in a little bit of pain.

Pleasure is a sort of oblivion, a forgetfulness. Pain is remembrance, you cannot forget pain.

Feeling is not selective, I keep telling you that. You can’t feel pain, you aren’t gonna feel anything else, either.

Youth might be wise; we suffer less from pains than pleasures.

Pain, I came to feel, might well prove to be the sole proof of the persistence of consciousness within the flesh, the sole physical expression of consciousness. As my body acquired muscle, and in turn strength, there was gradually born within me a tendency towards the positive acceptance of pain, and my interest in physical suffering deepened.

Feel the world, instead of trying to understand the world.

Now the dark air is like fire on my skin, And even the moonlight is blinding

Make the most of every sense; glory in all the facets of pleasure and beauty which the world reveals to you...

All pain is the same. Only the details are different.

It seems that most the world is driven by the eye, right? They design cities to look great but they always sound horrible ... They design telephones to look great, but they sound horrible. I think it was about time that the other senses were celebrated.

Time is measured by the quality and not the quanity of sensations it contains.

So through identification you have pleasure and pain.

There is no fundamental difference between man and animals in their ability to feel pleasure and pain, happiness, and misery.

Pleasure and pain, though directly opposite, are yet so contrived by nature as to be constant companions; and it is a fact that the same motions and muscles of the face are employed both in laughing and crying.

Pain narrows consciousness; pleasure blurs it.

Music takes me to places of illimitable sensual and insensate joy, accessing points of ecstasy that no angelic lover could ever locate, or plunging me into gibbering weeping hells of pain that no torturer could ever devise".

The sensory world is the school, without which the human being would never come to the spirit.

Drinking would shut down my seeing and my hearing and my feeling," she used to say. "Why would I want to be in the world if I couldn't touch the world with all of my senses intact?

I test my bath before I sit, And I'm always moved to wonderment That what chills the finger not a bit Is so frigid upon the fundament.

Pain and pleasure occur in consciousness and exist only there

You can't be conscious unless you have variable receptors... When people say the way I see the world is the way it is - that's ridiculous. We can only see it depending on the quality of our receptors and background.