The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope.
There is a certain aesthetic pleasure in trying to imagine the unimaginable and failing, if you are a reader.
I know that two and two make four - and should be glad to prove it too if I could - though I must say if by any sort of process I could convert 2 and 2 into five it would give me much greater pleasure.
Years of happiness can be lost in the foolish gratification of a momentary desire for pleasure.
Is 'The Wind in the Willows' a children's book? Is 'Alice in Wonderland?' Is 'Treasure Island?' These are masterpieces which we read with pleasure as children, but with how much more pleasure when we are grown-up.
You have to give people the pleasure of giving you.
The process of writing a novel is getting to know more about the novel until you know everything about it. And it's been described as a kind of dreamlike state where you're letting the novel make its own shape, and you're putting into it the pleasure of creation, which is intoxicating.
Cynicism is tough. A cynic's point of view is really pitiful. I derive pleasure out of a lot of things in life. As long as I'm fairly healthy, it's hard to stay dismal for very long.
God, who knows our most secret thoughts and who sees all, is witness to the purity of my principles. They are not founded on this barbarous ferocity that takes pleasure in shedding human blood.
I read books all the time. I'm just half looking for something to do; I mostly just read for pleasure. Occasionally I stumble across something that could be a movie, but I don't put a book down just because I don't see a movie in it, either.
If you have a relative who's lost interest in everything and doesn't get out of bed, who doesn't care for things they used to, can't imagine anything that would give them any pleasure, don't fool around with it; get therapy, get help, get medication if that's right for you, or talk therapy, or something.
There is a guilty pleasure in being rude and knowing that it's acting rather than you. But you get the same release as if you were being rude in life.
The most basic task of any museum must be the protection of works of cultural significance entrusted to its care for the edification and pleasure of future generations.
For me, I get immense pleasure out of giving. I do what I can. I try and give around 10% of my earnings a year. Some years, I give more, some I give less.
My mother was largely a housewife until she and my father were divorced. No one in the family read for pleasure - it was a very unintellectual household - but my mother did read to us when we were little, and that's how I started to read.
Idleness allows you to turn a situation from boredom to pleasure.
Nobody has ever written as many enjoyable, fun-to-read crime novels as Agatha Christie. It's all about the storytelling and the pleasure of the reader. She doesn't want to be deep or highbrow.
Your true traveller finds boredom rather agreeable than painful. It is the symbol of his liberty - his excessive freedom. He accepts his boredom, when it comes, not merely philosophically, but almost with pleasure.
I have always tried to live my life with enthusiasm and pleasure.
One of the strange things about imaginary food is that it allows us to take pleasure in reading about things that we would never want to eat in real life.
It is a real pleasure to collaborate with Frida Giannini and Gucci to celebrate one of the House's most elegant symbols: the horsebit.
Whoever has not experienced the pleasure of taking a young lady to her first game of ball should seize the first opportunity to do so. Her remarks about plays, her opinions of different players and the umpire, and the questions she will ask concerning the game, are all too funny to be missed.
I had the pleasure of working for Hart Hanson as the writers' assistant on the Fox show 'Bones.' He was always willing to take five minutes in the kitchen and answer questions I had about writing and the business. Looking back now, I realize he might have just been politely waiting for the coffee to brew.
Vampires get the joy of flying around and living forever, werewolves get the joy of animal spirits. But zombies, they're not rich, or aristocratic, they shuffle around. They're a group phenomenon, they're not very fast, they're quite sickly. So what's the pleasure of being one?
The unpredictability of the weather, the increasing possibility of intelligence introducing a species more powerful than ours, the growing uncertainty that animals can or should be slaughtered for our pleasure, has led many of us to start asking more complex questions about what is and isn't normal.
A lot of people seem to feel that joy is only the most intense version of pleasure, arrived at by the same road - you simply have to go a little further down the track. That has not been my experience.
I watch schlock telly. Like the 'Kardashians.' I love it. It's my guilty pleasure.
The only pleasure in redecorating or moving house comes from stumbling across books that I'd almost forgotten I owned.
Anything that has a relationship with pleasure, we reject it. Eating, they talk about cholesterol; making love, they talk about AIDS; you talk about smoking, they talk about cancer. It's a very sick society that rejects pleasure.
