The mind is never satisfied with the objects immediately before it but is always breaking away from the present moment and losing itself in schemes of future felicity... The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure but from hope to hope.

Enjoy present pleasures in such a way as not to injure future ones.

Good fellowship and friendship are lasting rational and manly pleasures.

Marriage is the highest state of friendship. If happy it lessens our cares by dividing them at the same time that it doubles our pleasures by mutual participation.

Friendship is the source of the greatest pleasures and without friends even the most agreeable pursuits become tedious.

If it's very painful for you to criticize your friends - you're safe in doing it. But if you take the slightest pleasure in it that's the time to hold your tongue.

In the sweetness of friendship let there be laughter and sharing of pleasures. For in the dew of little things the heart finds its morning and is refreshed.

Pleasure and freedom from pain are the only things desirable as ends.

Your true traveller finds boredom rather agreeable than painful. It is the symbol of his liberty - his excessive freedom. He accepts his boredom when it comes not merely philosophically but almost with pleasure.

End-of-the-world stories tend to ring true. I've always been drawn to them but as I wrote my own I found surprising pleasure in creating a world that is so radically changed yet where there's so much meaning and value in every small and ordinary thing we have and take for granted: hot showers enough food friends routines.