Pleasure is never as pleasant as we expected it to be and pain is always more painful. The pain in the world always outweighs the pleasure. If you don't believe it, compare the respective feelings of two animals, one of which is eating the other.
But what if pleasure and pain should be so closely connected that he who wants the greatest possible amount of the one must also have the greatest possible amount of the other, that he who wants to experience the "heavenly high jubilation," must also be ready to be "sorrowful unto death"?
I seek the utmost pleasure and the least pain.
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.
It is one of history's greatest ironies that, over the centuries, the pursuit of pleasure has resulted in more pain than enjoyment.
When the Idea, of any Pleasure strikes your Imagination... let that time be employed in making a just Computation between, the duration of the Pleasure, and that of the Repentance sure to follow it.
If there is no enjoyment in this world, there would not be so much suffering. As suffering really is the frustration of our attempts to enjoy.
There is no such thing as pure, unalloyed pleasure; some bitter ever mingles with the sweet.
I am an Epicurean. I consider the genuine (not the imputed) doctrines of Epicurus as containing everything rational in moral philosophy which Greek and Roman leave to us.
Pleasure becomes a value, a teleological end in itself. It's probably more Western than U.S. per se.
I take it as a prime cause of the present confusion of society that it is too sickly and too doubtful to use pleasure frankly as a test of value.
