Saint Augustine Quotes

This is the tendency of all living things: to avoid pain and to cling to pleasure.

We're animals. We're born like every other mammal and we live our whole lives around disguised animal thoughts.

Actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness; wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness. By happiness is intended pleasure and the absence of pain.

Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do.

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

I seek the utmost pleasure and the least pain.

Most human behavior is nothing other than the avoidance of pain and the pursuit of pleasure.

Pleasure causes us to do base actions and pain causes us to abstain from doing noble actions.

Perhaps all pleasure is only relief.

I want to reconnect to my animal life.

I've always been really in touch with my primal instincts. In my profession, you have to be.

All desirable things... are desirable either for the pleasure inherent in themselves, or as a means to the promotion of pleasure and the prevention of pain.

Throw moderation to the winds, and the greatest pleasures bring the greatest pains.

It is always by way of pain one arrives at pleasure.

The unique and supreme voluptuousness of love lies in the certainty of committing evil. And men and women know from birth that in evil is found all sensual delight.

Luxury is an enticing pleasure, a bastard mirth, which hath honey in her mouth, gall in her heart, and a sting in her tail.

A man of pleasure is a man of pains.

People idealise their animals, and at the same time they patronisingly overlook a dog's natural life - biting fleas, burying bones, rolling in garbage, barking up an empty tree all night... But what do they do themselves? Bury stuff that will rot in secret and then dig it up and bury it again and rant and rave under empty trees!

Be a good animal, true to your animal instincts.

The first inclination which an animal has is to protect itself

Power is pleasure; and pleasure sweetens pain.

The most total opposite of pleasure is not pain but boredom, for we are willing to risk pain to make a boring life interesting.

I conceive that pleasures are to be avoided if greater pains be the consequence, and pains to be coveted that will terminate in greater pleasures.