Hedonistic Philosophy Quotes

I have always lived violently, drunk hugely, eaten too much or not at all, slept around the clock or missed two nights of sleeping, worked too hard and too long in glory, or slobbed for a time in utter laziness. I've lifted, pulled, chopped, climbed, made love with joy and taken my hangovers as a consequence, not as a punishment.

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

The philosophy of hedonism means little to lovers of pleasure. They have no inclination to read philosophy, or to write it.

The wise man neither rejects life nor fears death... just as he does not necessarily choose the largest amount of food, but, rather, the pleasantest food, so he prefers not the longest time, but the most pleasant.

What would really satisfy us would be a God who said of anything we happened to like doing, 'What does it matter so long as they are contented?'

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.

I'm a hedonist.

Virtue can procure only an imaginary happiness; true felicity lies only in the senses, and virtue gratifies none of them.

Abstaining so as really to enjoy, is the epicurism, the very perfection, of reason.

Power is pleasure; and pleasure sweetens pain.

If we include hedonistic philosophy in hospitals, the lives of patients suffering from cancer would be much, much better.

All human happiness is sensuous happiness.

There is a line that I always loved from Lucretius. He said, "The sublime is the art of exchanging easier for more difficult pleasures." The presumption of that formulation is that the more difficult pleasures are actually better than the easier pleasures. That is why one makes the exchange.

Hume's doctrine was that the circumstances vary, the amount of happiness does not; that the beggar cracking fleas in the sunshine under a hedge, and the duke rolling by in his chariot, the girl equipped for her first ball, and the orator returning triumphant from the debate, had different means, but the same quantity of pleasant excitement.

Selfish hedonism is not a pejorative. It is a description - an exactly accurate description of what is involved in homosexual relations.

I take it as a prime cause of the present confusion of society that it is too sickly and too doubtful to use pleasure frankly as a test of value.