Abstainer: a weak person who yields to the temptation of denying himself a pleasure.
The Puritans thought they could simply repress man's sexual nature, and they reaped a whirlwind as a result. Their code of sexual morality - which became America's - was nothing more than a set of rules laid down by people who believed that all pleasure was suspect.
Love not Pleasure; love God.
Anything that has a relationship with pleasure, we reject it. Eating, they talk about cholesterol; making love, they talk about AIDS; you talk about smoking, they talk about cancer. It's a very sick society that rejects pleasure.
Human wisdom makes as ill use of her talent when she exercises it in rescinding from the number and sweetness of those pleasures that are naturally our due, as she employs it favorably and well in artificially disguising and tricking out the ills of life to alleviate the sense of them.
There is a story about a schoolboy who was asked what he thought God was like. He replied that, as far as he could make out, God was 'the sort of person who is always snooping around to see if anyone is enjoying himself and then trying to stop it.'
The aim of the wise is not to secure pleasure, but to avoid pain.
Nothing makes us angrier than the fear that some pleasure is being enjoyed by others but forever denied to us.
I don't have much patience for people who are self-conscious about the act of eating, and it irritates me when someone denies themselves the pleasure of a bloody hunk of steak or a pungent French cheese because of some outdated nonsense about what's appropriate or attractive.
As individuals, we don't sometimes let ourselves enjoy things that we possibly should because of ways you want to be perceived, which is a silly thing as well.
I couldn't understand her [my mother's] wiring, all the time. I couldn't understand how she denied herself pleasure and enjoyment in life. As my career got successful and I wanted to do things for her, she wasn't able to allow them because she just didn't work that way. It was always that. It wasn't necessarily ugly, just complicated.
But there must be some pleasure in condemning everything--in perceiving faults where others think they see beauties.' 'You mean there is pleasure in having no pleasure.
