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"With the animal, present suffering, even if repeated countless times, remains what it was the first time: it cannot sum itself up. Hence the enviable composure and unconcern which characterizes the animal. With man, on the other hand, there evolves out of those elements of pleasure and suffering which he has in common with the animal an intensification of his sensations of happiness and misery which can lead to momentary transports which may sometimes even prove fatal, or to suicidal despair. More closely considered, what happens is this: he deliberately intensifies his needs, which are originally scarcely harder to satisfy than those of the animal, so as to intensify his pleasure: hence luxury, confectionery, tobacco, opium, alcoholic drinks, finery, and all that pertains to them. To these is then added, also as a result of reflection, a source of pleasure, and consequently of suffering, available to him alone and one which preoccupies him beyond all measure, indeed more than the rest put together: ambition and a sense of honour and shame—in plain words, what he thinks others think of him." Arthur Schopenhauer   "Before the rise of instrumental reasoning (or rather, its extension from mundane tasks like carpentry to decisions about how best to live) the general view (at least among the ruling and writing elites) was that what mattered most was not whether you succeeded or failed, but what sort of person you were; honor, self-respect, dignity, reputation, and a clear conscience were held to be more important than success in acquiring power, pleasure, or wealth. Here, to take a single example, is Xenophon expressing views which would have been recognized by any ancient Greek or Roman citizen: 'All creatures seem in a similar fashion to take pleasure in food, drink, sleep, and sex. But the love of honor does not grow up in animals lacking speech. Nor, for that matter, can it be found in all human beings. The lust for honor and praise grows up only in those who are most fully distinguished from the beasts of the fields: which is to say that it grows up only in those judged to be real men and no longer mere human beings.' In Xenophon's understanding, women, slaves, and those who worked for a living were 'mere human beings,' incapable of honor, and thus insufficiently distinguished from the beasts of the fields. Plenty of Greek and Roman citizens did not live up to their own ideals and principles, but they had no doubt that to give priority to power, pleasure, profit, or utility—to, in a word, advantage—over honor, praise, or virtue was debasing and degrading." David Wootton   "Declining peoples first lose their moderation. They go after the particular, they throw themselves shortsightedly upon what is insignificant, they set the contingent above the general, then they seek pleasure and the sensual, they seek satisfaction of their hatred and envy, their art depicts what is one-sided, then the distracted, the untrue, the adventurous, eventually the sensuous, the exciting, and ultimately immorality and vice. The distinction between good and evil is lost, the individual scorns the whole and pursues his pleasure or his destruction, and thus the nation falls prey to its inner confusion or to an external, more savage but more powerful enemy." Adalbert Stifter   "Inside its cocoon of work or social obligation, the human spirit slumbers for the most part, registering the distinction between pleasure and pain, but not nearly as alert as we pretend. There are periods in the most thrilling day during which nothing happens, and though we continue to exclaim 'I do enjoy myself' or 'I am horrified' we are insincere. 'As far as I feel anything, it is enjoyment, horror'—it's no more than that really, and a perfectly adjusted organism would be silent." Edward Morgan Forster   "A permanently successful peace-economy cannot be a simple pleasure-economy. In the more or less socialistic future towards which mankind seems drifting we must still subject ourselves collectively to those severities which answer to our real position upon this only partly hospitable globe. We must make new energies and hardihoods continue the manliness to which the military mind so faithfully clings. Martial virtues must be the enduring cement; intrepidity, contempt of softness, surrender of private interest, obedience to command, must still remain the rock upon which states are built—unless, indeed, we wish for dangerous reactions against commonwealths fit only for contempt, and liable to invite attack whenever a centre of crystallization for military-minded enterprise gets formed anywhere in their neighborhood." William James   "Oblonsky never chose his tendencies and opinions any more than he chose the style of his hat or coat. He always wore those which happened to be in fashion. Moving in a certain circle where a desire for some form of mental activity was part of maturity, he was obliged to hold views in the same way he was obliged to wear a hat. If he had a reason for preferring Liberalism to the Conservatism of many in his set, it was not that he considered the liberal outlook more rational but because it corresponded better with his mode of life. The Liberal Party maintained that everything in Russia was bad; and in truth Oblonsky had many debts and decidedly too little money. The Liberal Party said that marriage was an obsolete institution which ought to be reformed; and indeed family life gave Oblonsky very little pleasure, forcing him to tell lies and dissemble, which was quite contrary to his nature. The Liberal Party said, or rather assumed, that religion was only a curb on the illiterate; and indeed Oblonsky could not stand through even the shortest church service without aching feet, or understand the point of all that dreadful, high-flown talk about the other world, when life in this world was really very pleasant." Leo Tolstoy   "To pursue a goal which is by definition unattainable is to condemn oneself to a state of perpetual unhappiness. Of course, man may hope contrary to all reason, and hope has its pleasures even when unreasonable. It may sustain him for a time; but it cannot survive the repeated disappointments of experience indefinitely. What more can the future offer him than the past, since he can never reach a tenable condition nor even approach the glimpsed ideal? Thus, the more one has, the more one wants, since satisfactions received only stimulate instead of filling needs. Shall action as such be considered agreeable? First, only on condition of blindness to its uselessness. Secondly, for this pleasure to be felt and to temper and half veil the accompanying painful unrest, such unending motion must at least always be easy and unhampered. If it is interfered with only restlessness is left, with the lack of ease which it, itself, entails." Emile Durkheim   "How much larger your life would be if your self could become smaller in it; if you could really look at other men with common curiosity and pleasure; if you could see them walking as they are in their sunny selfishness and their virile indifference! You would begin to be interested in them, because they were not interested in you. You would break out of this tiny and tawdry theatre in which your own little plot is always being played, and you would find yourself under a freer sky, in a street full of splendid strangers." Gilbert Keith Chesterton   "The value which all men put upon any particular pleasure depends on comparison and experience; nor is a porter less greedy of money which he spends on bacon and brandy than a courtier who purchases champagne and ortolans. Riches are valuable at all times and to all men; because they always purchase pleasures such as men are accustomed to and desire. Nor can any thing restrain or regulate the love of money but a sense of honour and virtue; which, if it be not nearly equal at all times, will naturally abound most in ages of knowledge and refinement." David Hume   "Think of it! Was it all to end in a counting-house on the top of a cinder-heap, with Podsnap's drawing-room in the offing, and a Whig committee dealing out champagne to the rich and margarine to the poor in such convenient proportions as would make all men contented together, though the pleasure of the eyes was gone from the world, and the place of Homer was to be taken by Huxley?" William Morris   "What I want, cully, is a chance to decide, from personal experience, that a life of cocktail parties, cars, week-ending at rich houses, wine, night-clubs and jazz won't bring happiness. I want to prove that money isn't everything, to learn that pleasure cloys." Kingsley Amis   "We say that the staple food of the people should be sold in the markets of the country as cheap as the competition of the world can make it, and that no private interests in England or elsewhere shall twist the law of the land so as to raise food prices artificially, and put unnatural profits in their pockets. That is the ground we are going to fight on. We say that every Englishman shall have the right to buy whatever he wants, wherever he chooses, at his own good pleasure, without restriction or discouragement from the state. That is our plan; we have followed it for sixty years, and whatever they say, we are not quite ruined yet." Winston Churchill   "These people are happy—their wants are satisfied, their desires fulfilled—their capacities of enjoyment meet with full employment—they are well fed, well clothed, well housed; moderate labour insures them all this, and leaves them leisure for such recreations as they are capable of enjoying; but how is it with me? And I mean not me myself alone, but all who, like myself, have received a higher degree of mental cultivation, whose estimate of happiness is, therefore, so much higher, whose capacity for enjoyment is so much more expanded and cultivated; can I be satisfied with a race in a circular railroad car, or a swing between the lime-trees? Where are my peculiar objects of pleasure and recreation? Where are the picture-galleries—the sculptures—the works of art and science—the countless wonders of human ingenuity and skill—the cultivated and refined society—the intercourse with men of genius, literature, scientific knowledge—where are all the sources from which I am to draw my recreations?" Fanny Kemble   "The people who believe most that our greatness and welfare are proved by our being very rich, and who most give their lives and thoughts to becoming rich, are just the very people whom we call the Philistines. Culture says: 'Consider these people, then, their way of life, their habits, their manners, the very tones of their voice; look at them attentively; observe the literature they read, the things which give them pleasure, the words which come forth out of their mouths, the thoughts which make the furniture of their minds; would any amount of wealth be worth having with the condition that one was to become just like these people by having it?' And thus culture begets a dissatisfaction which is of the highest possible value in stemming the common tide of men's thoughts in a wealthy and industrial community, and which saves the future, as one may hope, from being vulgarised, even if it cannot save the present." Matthew Arnold   "Once, during a concert of cathedral organ music, as I sat getting gooseflesh amid that tsunami of sound, I was struck with a thought: for a medieval peasant, this must have been the loudest human-made sound they ever experienced, awe-inspiring in now-unimaginable ways. No wonder they signed up for the religion being proffered. And now we are constantly pummeled with sounds that dwarf quaint organs. Once, hunter-gatherers might chance upon honey from a beehive and thus briefly satisfy a hardwired food craving. And now we have hundreds of carefully designed commercial foods that supply a burst of sensation unmatched by some lowly natural food. Once, we had lives that, amid considerable privation, also offered numerous subtle, hard-won pleasures. And now we have drugs that cause spasms of pleasure and dopamine release a thousandfold higher than anything stimulated in our old drug-free world." Robert Sapolsky   "Are we not, with this tremendous objective of obliterating all the sharp edges of life, well on the way to turning mankind into sand? Sand! Small, soft, round, unending sand! Is that your ideal, you heralds of the sympathetic affections? In the meantime, the question itself remains unanswered whether one is of more use to another by immediately leaping to his side and helping him—which help can in any case be only superficial where it does not become a tyrannical seizing and transforming—or by creating something out of oneself that the other can behold with pleasure: a beautiful, restful, self-enclosed garden perhaps, with high walls against storms and the dust of the roadway but also a hospitable gate." Friedrich Nietzsche   "What fed the tyranny was nothing other than inaction, the refusal to speak up against anything it wanted. Overcome by the pleasure of peace, we learned to live like slaves. Even those of us who suffered irremediable disaster, or saw it happen to our neighbours, were afraid of dying bravely. Death in the depths of shame was all we could expect." Titus Flavius Josephus   "Only part of us is sane: only part of us loves pleasure and the longer day of happiness, wants to live to our nineties and die in peace, in a house that we built, that shall shelter those who come after us. The other half of us is nearly mad. It prefers the disagreeable to the agreeable, loves pain and its darker night despair, and wants to die in a catastrophe that will set back life to its beginnings and leave nothing of our house save its blackened foundations." Cicely Fairfield   "Pity is sweet because, when we put ourselves in the place of one who suffers, we are aware nevertheless of the pleasure of not suffering like him. Envy is bitter because the sight of a happy man, far from putting the envious in his place, inspires him with regret that he is not there. The one seems to exempt us from the pains he suffers, the other seems to deprive us of the good things he enjoys." Jean-Jacques Rousseau   "He did measureless harm; more real and lasting harm, perhaps, than any other individual that ever wrote. Most of the world has now outlived good part of these harms, though by no means all of them; but in our South they flourish pretty forcefully still. Not so forcefully as half a generation ago, perhaps, but still forcefully. There, the genuine and wholesome civilization of the nineteenth century is curiously confused and commingled with the Walter Scott Middle-Age sham civilization; and so you have practical, common-sense, progressive ideas, and progressive works; mixed up with the duel, the inflated speech, and the jejune romanticism of an absurd past that is dead, and out of charity ought to be buried. But for the Sir Walter disease, the character of the Southerner—or Southron, according to Sir Walter's starchier way of phrasing it—would be wholly modern, in place of modern and medieval mixed, and the South would be fully a generation further advanced than it is. It was Sir Walter that made every gentleman in the South a Major or a Colonel, or a General or a Judge, before the war; and it was he, also, that made these gentlemen value these bogus decorations. For it was he that created rank and caste down there, and also reverence for rank and caste, and pride and pleasure in them." Samuel Clemens