#pleasure

Throughout the human experience people have read history because they felt that it was a pleasure and that it was in some way instructive. The profession of professor of history has taken it in a very different direction. ↗

— Donald Kagan

#different #direction #experience #felt #history

The best an American can look forward to is the lonely pleasure of one who stands at long last on a chilly and inhospitable mountaintop where few have been before, where few can follow and where few will consent to believe he has been. ↗

— George F. Kennan

#been #before #believe #best #chilly

The habit of reading is the only enjoyment in which there is no alloy; it lasts when all other pleasures fade. ↗

— Anthony Trollope

#enjoyment #fade #habit #lasts #only

I have, in my partner George Roberts, a person who is the most wonderful man in the world to me. He's like a brother to me. Creating with him, being side by side with him, in whatever we try to do, is a real pleasure to me. ↗

— Henry Kravis

#brother #creating #george #him #i

The end is the beginning of all things, Suppressed and hidden, Awaiting to be released through the rhythm Of pain and pleasure. ↗

— Jiddu Krishnamurti

#awaiting #beginning #end #hidden #pain

All this fuss about sleeping together. For physical pleasure I'd sooner go to my dentist any day. ↗

— Evelyn Waugh

#any #day #dentist #fuss #go

Happiness is neither virtue nor pleasure nor this thing nor that but simply growth, We are happy when we are growing. ↗

— William Butler Yeats

#growth #happiness #happy #neither #nor

In life there are two things which are dependable. The pleasures of the flesh and the pleasures of literature. ↗

— Sei Shōnagon

#life #literature #pleasure #life

A child's reading is guided by pleasure, but his pleasure is undifferentiated; he cannot distinguish, for example, between aesthetic pleasure and the pleasures of learning or daydreaming. In adolescence we realize that there are different kinds of pleasure, some of which cannot be enjoyed simultaneously, but we need help from others in defining them. Whether it be a matter of taste in food or taste in literature, the adolescent looks for a mentor in whose authority he can believe. He eats or reads what his mentor recommends and, inevitably, there are occasions when he has to deceive himself a little; he has to pretend that he enjoys olives or War and Peace a little more than he actually does. Between the ages of twenty and forty we are engaged in the process of discovering who we are, which involves learning the difference between accidental limitations which it is our duty to outgrow and the necessary limitations of our nature beyond which we cannot trespass with impunity. Few of us can learn this without making mistakes, without trying to become a little more of a universal man than we are permitted to be. It is during this period that a writer can most easily be led astray by another writer or by some ideology. When someone between twenty and forty says, apropos of a work of art, 'I know what I like,'he is really saying 'I have no taste of my own but accept the taste of my cultural milieu', because, between twenty and forty, the surest sign that a man has a genuine taste of his own is that he is uncertain of it. After forty, if we have not lost our authentic selves altogether, pleasure can again become what it was when we were children, the proper guide to what we should read. ↗

— W.H. Auden

#guidance #pleasure #reading #taste #age

I love that you get cold when it's 71 degrees out. I love that it takes you an hour and a half to order a sandwich. I love that you get a little crinkle above your nose when you're looking at me like I'm nuts. I love that after I spend the day with you, I can still smell your perfume on my clothes. And I love that you are the last person I want to talk to before I go to sleep at night. And it's not because I'm lonely, and it's not because it's New Year's Eve. I came here tonight because when you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible. ↗

— Nora Ephron

#declarations-of-love #foibles #future #harry-burns #in-love