This self-love is the instrument of our preservation; it resembles the provision for the perpetuity of mankind: it is necessary, it is dear to us, it gives us pleasure, and we must conceal it.
Voltaire

Nothing would be more tiresome than eating and drinking if God had not made them a pleasure as well as a necessity.
Voltaire

It is not known precisely where angels dwell whether in the air, the void, or the planets. It has not been God's pleasure that we should be informed of their abode.
Voltaire

The essence of all art is to have pleasure in giving pleasure.
Dale Carnegie

Illusions commend themselves to us because they save us pain and allow us to enjoy pleasure instead. We must therefore accept it without complaint when they sometimes collide with a bit of reality against which they are dashed to pieces.
Sigmund Freud

The goal towards which the pleasure principle impels us - of becoming happy - is not attainable: yet we may not - nay, cannot - give up the efforts to come nearer to realization of it by some means or other.
Sigmund Freud

One might think that the money value of an invention constitutes its reward to the man who loves his work. But... I continue to find my greatest pleasure, and so my reward, in the work that precedes what the world calls success.
Thomas A. Edison

I find my greatest pleasure, and so my reward, in the work that precedes what the world calls success.
Thomas A. Edison

Never permit a dichotomy to rule your life, a dichotomy in which you hate what you do so you can have pleasure in your spare time. Look for a situation in which your work will give you as much happiness as your spare time.
Pablo Picasso

We are certainly in a common class with the beasts; every action of animal life is concerned with seeking bodily pleasure and avoiding pain.
Saint Augustine

The God of this world is riches, pleasure and pride.
Martin Luther

The noblest pleasure is the joy of understanding.
Leonardo da Vinci

A woman is an occasional pleasure but a cigar is always a smoke.
Groucho Marx

It seems to me that if you or I must choose between two courses of thought or action, we should remember our dying and try so to live that our death brings no pleasure on the world.
John Steinbeck

There are not a few among the disciples of charity who require, in their vocation, scarcely less excitement than the votaries of pleasure in theirs.
Charles Dickens

That pleasure which is at once the most pure, the most elevating and the most intense, is derived, I maintain, from the contemplation of the beautiful.
Edgar Allan Poe

The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.
Jane Austen

Surprises are foolish things. The pleasure is not enhanced, and the inconvenience is often considerable.
Jane Austen

Most men pursue pleasure with such breathless haste that they hurry past it.
Soren Kierkegaard

Women have simple tastes. They get pleasure out of the conversation of children in arms and men in love.
H. L. Mencken