Jeremy Bentham Quotes

Pleasure is our first and kindred good. It is the starting point of every choice and of every aversion, and to it we always come back, inasmuch as we make feeling the rule by which to judge of every good thing.

Are these things good for any other reason except that they end in pleasure, and get rid of and avert pain? Are you looking to any other standard but pleasure and pain when you call them good?

Most people affirm pleasure to be the good, but the finer sort of wits say it is knowledge.

Pleasure is nothing else but the intermission of pain, the enjoying of something I am in great trouble for till I have it.

I seek the utmost pleasure and the least pain.

If there is no enjoyment in this world, there would not be so much suffering. As suffering really is the frustration of our attempts to enjoy.

Happiness? A good cigar, a good meal, a good cigar and a good woman - or a bad woman; it depends on how much happiness you can handle.

I like happy sets. Happy sets are good, and I think people feel comfortable on them.

A man of pleasure is a man of pains.

I love to sing and make music because it makes me feel good.

To seek the highest good is to live well.

There are only Epicureans, either crude or refined; Christ was the most refined.

You needn't tell me that a man who doesn't love oysters and asparagus and good wines has got a soul, or a stomach either. He's simply got the instinct for being unhappy highly developed.

Some people are worried about the difference between right and wrong. I'm worried about the difference between wrong and fun.

The happiest is he who suffers least; the most miserable is he who enjoys least.

We begin every act of choice and avoidance from pleasure, and it is to pleasure that we return using our experience of pleasure as the criterion of every good thing.

Music is the only sensual pleasure without vice.

No man can be brave who thinks pain the greatest evil; nor temperate, who considers pleasure the highest good.

You see, nothing matters except pleasure - which is the opposite of happiness, its tragic part, I expect.

It is one of history's greatest ironies that, over the centuries, the pursuit of pleasure has resulted in more pain than enjoyment.

By utility is meant that property is any object, whereby it tends to produce benefit, advantage, pleasure, good, or happiness(all this in the present case come to the same thing) or (what comes again to the same thing) to prevent the happening of mischief, pain, evil or unhappiness to the party who whose is considered: if that party be the community in general, then the happiness of the community; if a particular individual; then the happiness of that individual

To what shall the character of utility be ascribed, if not to that which is a source of pleasure?

I have never been convinced there's anything inherently wrong in having fun.