The greatest pleasure I know is to do a good action by stealth and have it found out by accident.
Charles Lamb

Reporters thrive on the world's misfortune. For this reason they often take an indecent pleasure in events that dismay the rest of humanity.
Russell Baker

People seem to enjoy things more when they know a lot of other people have been left out of the pleasure.
Russell Baker

Pleasure only starts once the worm has got into the fruit, to become delightful happiness must be tainted with poison.
Georges Bataille

There is a pleasure in being mad which none but madmen know.
John Dryden

When I eat with my friends, it is a moment of real pleasure, when I really enjoy my life.
Monica Bellucci

The test and the use of man's education is that he finds pleasure in the exercise of his mind.
Jacques Barzun

The puritan hated bear baiting, not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators.
Thomas B. Macaulay

As soon as beauty is sought not from religion and love, but for pleasure, it degrades the seeker.
Annie Dillard

When I was in Birmingham I used to go to a place called Redwood Field. I used to get there for a two o'clock game. Where can you make this kind of money playing sports? It was just a pleasure to go out and enjoy myself and get paid for it.
Willie Mays

I enjoy my work. I haven't been an actor for 30 years without getting pleasure out of the profession.
Bela Lugosi

Children should learn that reading is pleasure, not just something that teachers make you do in school.
Beverly Cleary

Ah, the pleasure, the joy - a big news story that runs and runs, that is played down by some of our journalistic colleagues, saying 'it'll never happen', only to be confirmed by the Home Secretary.
Kamal Ahmed

It is impossible to read for pleasure from something to which you are both father and mother, born in such travail that the writer despises the thing that enslaved him.
Jim Bishop

This was the first day of our beginning to take up plants: we had much pleasure in collecting them for the natives offered their assistance and perfectly understood the method of taking them up and pruning them.
William Bligh

Some people wish above all to conform to the rules, I wish only to render what I can hear. There is no theory. You have only to listen. Pleasure is the law.
Claude Debussy

Never write anything that does not give you great pleasure. Emotion is easily transferred from the writer to the reader.
Joseph Joubert

Remorse, the fatal egg that pleasure laid.
William Cowper

Money gives me pleasure all the time.
Hilaire Belloc

The eruption of lived pleasure is such that in losing myself I find myself; forgetting that I exist, I realize myself.
Raoul Vaneigem