Human beings place their desires ahead of the collective good.
Every man hath a general desire of his own happiness; and likewise a variety of particular affections, passions, and appetites to particular external objects.
Pleasure is continually disappointed, reduced, deflated, in favor of strong, noble values: Truth, Death, Progress, Struggle, Joy, etc. Its victorious rival is Desire: we are always being told about Desire, never about Pleasure.
If something makes someone happy, then that's what they should do.
The philosophy of hedonism means little to lovers of pleasure. They have no inclination to read philosophy, or to write it.
I think the Playboy philosophy is very, very connected to the American dream.
Men seek but one thing in life - their pleasure.
I must confess that I am interested in leisure in the same way that a poor man is interested in money.
On the whole, I am on the side of the unregenerate who affirms the worth of life as an end in itself, as against the saints who deny it.
There is no greater fault than sensual indulgence. There is no greater misfortune than malcontent. There is no greater calamity than greed.
The mother of excess is not joy but joylessness.
Being wealthy is often a powerful predictor that people spend less time doing pleasurable things and more time doing compulsory things and feeling stressed.
When you're comfortable and secure, it's not enough. The mind doesn't stop there because it has to continue to focus itself as this body, so it moves to pleasure. And pleasure really is a non-existent thing. When we're experiencing pleasure, we're trying to hold onto it as it leaves, so it really isn't pleasure. Pleasure is pain because we're grasping.
We find that the more a cultivated reason devotes itself to the aim of enjoying life and happiness, the further does man get away from true contentment.
To the love of pleasure we may therefore ascribe most of the agreeable, to the love of action we may attribute most of the useful and respectable, qualifications. The character in which both the one and the other should be united and harmonised would seem to constitute the most perfect idea of human nature.
If you're not having a good time, find something else that gives you some joy in life.
Ultimately, all human activities have as their goal the realization of happiness. Why, then, have we ended up producing the opposite result? Could the underlying cause be our failure to correctly understand the true nature of happiness?
One who is in search of knowledge should give up the search of pleasure and the one who is in search of pleasure should give up the search of knowledge.
One set of messages of the society we live in is: Consume. Grow. Do what you want. Amuse yourselves.
Man is a luxury-loving animal. Take away play, fancies, and luxuries, and you will turn man into a dull, sluggish creature, barely energetic enough to obtain a bare subsistence. A society becomes stagnant when its people are too rational or too serious to be tempted by baubles.
Vices are simply the errors which a man makes in his search after his own happiness. Unlike crimes, they imply no malice toward others, and no interference with their persons or property.
...spend my time warring and whoring, that's what I was made for.
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.
A man given to vice is always an idealist.
I do not find fault with equality for drawing men into the pursuit of forbidden pleasures, but for absorbing them entirely in the search for the pleasures that are permitted.
