Pleasure and Pain Quotes

The word 'happiness' would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.

It would be better if there were nothing. Since there is more pain than pleasure on earth, every satisfaction is only transitory, creating new desires and new distresses, and the agony of the devoured animal is always far greater than the pleasure of the devourer

Without Pain, How Could We Know Joy?

I want to have not only the good side of life but the bad side of life. And the both combined is just my music. It's funny at the same time as it's sad.

Life does not agree with philosophy: There is no happiness that is not idleness, and only what is useless is pleasurable.

In 'The Republic' he [Plato] states that the enjoyment of food is not a true pleasure because the purpose of eating is to relieve pain - hunger.

We are constantly railing against the passions; we ascribe to them all of man's afflictions, and we forget that they are also the source of all his pleasures.

Only the person who has experienced light and darkness, war and peace, rise and fall, only that person has truly experienced life.

Well, here he was. They could save each other, the way the poets promised lovers should. He was mystery, he was darkness, he was all she had dreamed of. And if she would only free him he would service her - oh yes - until her pleasure reached that threshold that, like all thresholds, was a place where the strong grew stronger, and the weak perished. Pleasure was pain there, and vice versa. And he knew it well enough to call it home.

The existence of pleasure is the first mystery. The existence of pain has prompted far more philosophical speculation. Pleasure and pain need to be considered together; they are inseparable. Yet the space filled by each is perhaps different. Pleasure, defined as a sense of gratification, is essential for nature

Violent pleasures which reach the soul through the body are generally of this sort-they are reliefs of pain.

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.

I'm just following the Irish tradition of songwriting, the Irish way of life, the human way of life. Cram as much pleasure into life, and rail against the pain you have to suffer as a result. Or scream and rant with the pain, and wait for it to be taken away with beautiful pleasure . . .

We have no knowledge, that is, no general principles drawn from the contemplation of particular facts, but what has been built up by pleasure, and exists in us by pleasure alone. The Man of Science, the Chemist and Mathematician, whatever difficulties and disgusts they may have had to struggle with, know and feel this. However painful may be the objects with which the Anatomist's knowledge is connected, he feels that his knowledge is pleasure; and where he has no pleasure he has no knowledge.

Love is pleasure accompanied by the idea of an external cause, and hatred pain accompanied by the idea of an external cause.

One of my realizations is that if you revel over joy, you're going to ache over pain and get killed over hurt. Your span of feelings are going to go just as far one way as the other.

There is room in the halls of pleasure for a large and lordly train, but one by one we must all file on through the narrow aisles of pain.

When pain ends, gain ends too.

We have not an hour of life in which our pleasures relish not some pain, our sours, some sweetness.

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?

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.

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.

Masochists are people that have pleasure confused with pain. In a world that has television confused with entertainment, doritoes confused with food, and Dan Quayle confused with a national political leader, masochists are clearly less mixed-up than the rest of us.