Lawrence Durrell Quotes

What consoles one nowadays is not repentance but pleasure. Repentance is quite out of date.

The man of pleasure, by a vain attempt to be more happy than any man can be, is often more miserable than most men are.

A man of pleasure is a man of pains.

How quick the old woe follows a little bliss!

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.

The attraction of a life devoted to sensation, pleasure and self would probably wear thin one day, but there was still plenty of time for that yet.

Men seek but one thing in life - their pleasure.

The self-indulgent man craves for all pleasant things... and is led by his appetite to choose these at the cost of everything else.

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

Luxury is an enticing pleasure, a bastard mirth, which hath honey in her mouth, gall in her heart, and a sting in her tail.

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.

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.

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

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

Pleasure is in itself a good; nay, even setting aside immunity from pain, the only good.

Power is pleasure; and pleasure sweetens pain.

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.

All objective pleasure in the long run must bring pain, because of the fact of change or death.

I'm a Christian, but I'm not a puritan. I believe in pleasure and orgiastic pleasure has its place, intellectual pleasure has its place, social pleasure has its place, televisual pleasure has its place [in life].

We may think we live for wisdom, but in fact we're living for the the pleasure wisdom brings us.

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.

There is something self-defeating in the too-conscious pursuit of pleasure.

Romance is very pretty in novels, but the romance of a life is always a melancholy matter. They are most happy who have no story to tell.