#pleasures

The life of a man who deliberately runs through his fortune often becomes a business speculation; his friends, his pleasures, patrons, and acquaintances are his capital. ↗

— Honore de Balzac

#becomes #business #capital #deliberately #fortune

This sense of power is the highest and best of pleasures when the belief on which it is founded is a true belief, and has been fairly earned by investigation. ↗

— William Kingdon Clifford

#belief #best #earned #fairly #founded

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

Pleasures First look from morning's window The rediscovered book Fascinated faces Snow, the change of the seasons The newspaper The dog Dialectics Showering, swimming Old music Comfortable shoes Comprehension New music Writing, planting Traveling Singing Being friendly ↗

— Bertolt Brecht

#change

There are no pleasures in a fight but some of my fights have been a pleasure to win. ↗

— Muhammad Ali

#fight #fights #pleasure #pleasures #some

Yet, so far from laboring to know the forbidden tree of worldly pleasures and its various fruits, man gives himself up to a careless and thoughtless state of life, and yields to the lust of the flesh, not considering that this lust is really the forbidden tree. ↗

— Johann Arndt

#considering #far #flesh #forbidden #fruits

To make pleasures pleasant shortens them. ↗

— Charles Buxton

#pleasant #pleasures #shortens #them

Being a Brady comes with it's pleasures and its baggage. I'm not one given to a lack of privacy and invasion. ↗

— Christopher Knight

#being #brady #comes #given #i

I loved the house the way you would any new house, because it is populated by your future, the family of children who will fill it with noise or chaos and satisfying busy pleasures. ↗

— Jane Smiley

#because #busy #chaos #children #family

It is possible for a writer to make, or remake at least, for a reader, the primary pleasures of eating, or drinking, or looking on, or sex. Novels have their obligatory tour-de-force, the green-flecked gold omelette aux fines herbes, melting into buttery formlessness and tasting of summer, or the creamy human haunch, firm and warm, curved back to reveal a hot hollow, a crisping hair or two, the glimpsed sex. They do not habitually elaborate on the equally intense pleasure of reading. There are obvious reasons for this, the most obvious being the regressive nature of the pleasure, a mise-en-abîme even, where words draw attention to the power and delight of words, and so ad infinitum, thus making the imagination experience something papery and dry, narcissistic and yet disagreeably distanced, without the immediacy of sexual moisture or the scented garnet glow of a good burgundy. And yet, natures such as Roland's are at their most alert and heady when reading is violently yet steadily alive. (What an amazing word "heady" is, en passant, suggesting both acute sensuous alertness and its opposite, the pleasure of the brain as opposed to the viscera—though each is implicated in the other, as we know very well, with both, when they are working.) ↗

— A.S. Byatt

#pleasures #reading #equality