J. P. Donleavy Quotes

Be ignorance thy choice, where knowledge leads to woe.

If not bliss, ignorance can at least be fun.

It seldom happens that any felicity comes so pure as not to be tempered and allayed by some mixture of sorrow.

What happiness is there which is not purchased with more or less of pain?

How delicious is pleasure after torment!

Happiness is a monstrosity! Punished are those who seek it.

No one could be more happy than a man who has never known affliction.

The end of pain we take as happiness.

If ignorance is bliss, why isn't the world happier?

Nobody can be happy. You could have moments of happiness, moments of joy. But life is very difficult. Unless you're a total idiot. Then you can be happy.

This idea of body is a simple superstition. It is superstition that makes us happy or unhappy. It is superstition caused by ignorance that makes us feel heat and cold, pain and pleasure.

Suffering, I was beginning to think, was essential to a good life, and as inextricable from such a life as bliss. It’s a great enhancer. It might last a minute, but eventually it subsides, and when it does, something else takes its place, and maybe that thing is a great space. For happiness. Each time I encountered suffering, I believed that I grew, and further defined my capacities – not just my physical ones, but my interior ones as well, for contentment, friendship, or any other human experience.

Where there is a mind, there are feelings such as pain, pleasure, and joy. No sentient being wants pain: all wants happiness instead.

Faint is the bliss, that never past thro' pain.

Pleasure is not the goal of man, but knowledge. Pleasure and happiness comes to an end. It is a mistake to suppose that pleasure is the goal. The cause of all the miseries we have in the world is that men foolishly think pleasure to be the ideal to strive for. After a time man finds that it is not happiness, but knowledge, towards which he is going, and that both pleasure and pain are great teachers.

It is no wonder if, under the pressure of these possibilities of suffering, men are accustomed to moderate their claims to happiness - just as the pleasure principle itself, indeed, under the influence of the external world, changed into the more modest reality principle -, if a man thinks himself happy merely to have escaped unhappiness or to have survived his suffering, and if in general the task of avoiding suffering pushes that of obtaining pleasure into the background.

It is sometimes easier to be happy if you don't know everything.

Desire, said the Buddha, is the cause of suffering. But without desire, what delight?

For all the happiness mankind can gain Is not in pleasure, but in rest from pain.

If ignorance is bliss, why aren't there more happy people in the world?

The unendurable is the beginning of the curve of joy.

Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.

Without pain, how could we know joy?' This is an old argument in the field of thinking about suffering and its stupidity and lack of sophistication could be plumbed for centuries but suffice it to say that the existence of broccoli does not, in any way, affect the taste of chocolate.

The ignorant man never enjoys.

Whoever said ignorance was bliss was shortsighted.