If pleasure was not followed by pain, who would forbear it?
Samuel Johnson

The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope.
Samuel Johnson

Prosperity is the measure or touchstone of virtue, for it is less difficult to bear misfortune than to remain uncorrupted by pleasure.
Tacitus

It is less difficult to bear misfortunes than to remain uncorrupted by pleasure.
Tacitus

Pleasure that isn't paid for is as insipid as everything else that's free.
Anita Loos

The bourgeois prefers comfort to pleasure, convenience to liberty, and a pleasant temperature to the deathly inner consuming fire.
Hermann Hesse

It's always a pleasure to talk about someone else's work.
Chuck Close

My dreams were all my own; I accounted for them to nobody; they were my refuge when annoyed - my dearest pleasure when free.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

I was never that much a focus of interest that I became a 'thing' at an earlier point in my career. I'm aware of having become a 'thing' now, which doesn't give me a lot of pleasure.
Matt Damon

If we had no faults of our own, we should not take so much pleasure in noticing those in others.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld

I had the pleasure, as Robin said, to live a childhood dream as many young Americans and Puerto Rican children live that play youth baseball. And I feel honored and very thankful for that opportunity.
Nolan Ryan

When I come into the theatre I get a sense of security. I love an audience. I love people, and I act because I like trying to give pleasure to people.
Vivien Leigh

To me, being an intellectual doesn't mean knowing about intellectual issues; it means taking pleasure in them.
Jacob Bronowski

I never learned anything at all in school and didn't read a book for pleasure until I was 19 years old.
Stanley Kubrick

I also derive a great deal of pleasure from horses and dogs... the ocean... and love.
William Shatner

Captain Kirk has been a source of pleasure and income for a long time.
William Shatner

Tragedy delights by affording a shadow of the pleasure which exists in pain.
Percy Bysshe Shelley

The pleasure that is in sorrow is sweeter than the pleasure of pleasure itself.
Percy Bysshe Shelley

Real love is the love that sometimes arises after sensual pleasure: if it does, it is immortal; the other kind inevitably goes stale, for it lies in mere fantasy.
Giacomo Casanova

The good pleasure of God is an act of the divine will freely and effectively determining all things.
William Ames