Emily Dickinson Quotes

We inhabit a world where we're taught that we can have what we desire, and tend to act on it - the least we can do is admit to it when we succumb to our instincts.

Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do.

If pleasure was not followed by pain, who would forbear it?

The majority of mankind would seem to be beguiled into error by pleasure, which, not being really a good, yet seems to be so. So that they indiscriminately choose as good whatsoever gives them pleasure, while they avoid all pain alike as evil.

Men seek but one thing in life - their pleasure.

I'm a total pleasure seeker. I pursue anything that satisfies me. I usually get it. I have specific needs and I know what they are so I can achieve satisfaction.

I'm a big believer that you can try to change the world based on philosophy, doctrine, and belief. But I think the thing that really drives the world is hedonism, the pleasure factor.

The sum of the whole is plainly this: The nature of man considered in his single capacity, and with respect only to the present world, is adapted and leads him to attain the greatest happiness he can for himself in the present world.

We are certainly in a common class with the beasts; every action of animal life is concerned with seeking bodily pleasure and avoiding pain.

People are extremely reluctant to give up that which gives them pleasure.

It's the human condition. We gravitate to what's easy, things that are comfortable, convenient, pain-free, self-serving.

This is the tendency of all living things: to avoid pain and to cling to pleasure.

This body of ours has one fault: the more you indulge it, the more things it discovers to be essential to it. It is extraordinary how it likes being indulged.

Though sages may pour out their wisdom's treasure, there is no sterner moralist than pleasure.

A man of pleasure is a man of pains.

One declaims endlessly against the passions; one imputes all of man's suffering to them. One forgets that they are also the source of all his pleasures.

Sensual excess drives out pity in man.

Man is a creation of desire, not a creation of need.

Actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness; wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness. By happiness is intended pleasure and the absence of pain.

It's the same thing that drives people to want to experience sexual pleasure or have one too many drinks. We all want to experience the other, and to get out of our daily existence.

Most men pursue pleasure with such breathless haste that they hurry past it.

Economic man and sensual man are not suppressible.

The ordinary surroundings of life which are esteemed by men (as their actions testify) to be the highest good, may be classed under the three heads — Riches, Fame, and the Pleasures of Sense: with these three the mind is so absorbed that it has little power to reflect on any different good.

We don't plan to be good or bad. We just think, 'What do I want now? I want coffee now. I want the paper now.'