Everything that is new or uncommon raises a pleasure in the imagination because it fills the soul with an agreeable surprise gratifies its curiosity and gives it an idea of which it was not before possessed.

I think that different pleasures work for different readers - a friend of mine won't read anything that's not a cardiovascular sort of page-turner. I tend to care less about plot but I'm a sucker for humor and strangeness.

Before I do a play I say that I hope it's going to be for as short a time as possible but once you do it it is a paradoxical pleasure. One evening out of two there are five minutes of a miracle and for those five minutes you want to do it again and again. It's like a drug.

The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure but from hope to hope.

I hope that posterity will judge me kindly not only as to the things which I have explained but also to those which I have intentionally omitted so as to leave to others the pleasure of discovery.

If my world were to cave in tomorrow I would look back on all the pleasures excitements and worthwhilenesses I have been lucky enough to have had. Not the sadness not my miscarriages or my father leaving home but the joy of everything else. It will have been enough.

Happy happy Christmas that can win us back to the delusions of our childhood days recall to the old man the pleasures of his youth and transport the traveler back to his own fireside and quiet home!

Religions which condemn the pleasures of sense drive men to seek the pleasures of power. Throughout history power has been the vice of the ascetic.

The first draught serveth for health the second for pleasure the third for shame and the fourth for madness.

Fame and power are the objects of all men. Even their partial fruition is gained by very few and that too at the expense of social pleasure health conscience life.