Wordgrove Post & Review

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The Pleasure Edition

Quoted in The Grove:
Plunging to the very depths of sensual pleasure, he gathered more gravel than pearls.
~Honoré de Balzac

Most men pursue pleasure with such breathless haste that they hurry past it.
~Søren Kierkegaard

There is something self-defeating in the too conscious pursuit of pleasure.
~Max Eastman

EndQuote:
Our pleasures were simple — they included survival.
~Dwight D Eisenhower

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Exercise Prompt for 01/11/22:   enter/entrance

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It is the paradox of life that the way to miss pleasure is to seek it first. The very first condition of lasting happiness is that a life should be full of purpose, aiming at something outside self.
~Hugo Black

Happiness is different from pleasure. Happiness has something to do with struggling and enduring and accomplishing.
~George A Sheehan

Happiness is neither virtue nor pleasure nor this thing nor that but simply growth, We are happy when we are growing.
~William Butler Yeats

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Life is made up of small pleasures. Happiness is made up of those tiny successes. The big ones come too infrequently. And if you don’t collect all these tiny successes, the big ones don’t really mean anything.
~Norman Lear

…why not seize the pleasure at once? — How often is happiness destroyed by preparation, foolish preparation!
~Jane Austen

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A man enjoys the happiness he feels, a woman the happiness she gives.
~Pierre Choderlos de Laclos

According to your sympathy, you will take pleasure in your own happiness or in the happiness of other people; but it is always your own happiness you seek.
~John Buchanan Robinson

I shouldn’t be surprised if the greatest rule of all weren’t to give pleasure.
~Moliere

A string of excited, fugitive, miscellaneous pleasures is not happiness; happiness resides in imaginative reflection and judgment
~George Santayana

Fun I love, but too much fun is of all things the most loathsome. Mirth is better than fun, and happiness is better than mirth.
~William Blake

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Pleasure’s a sin, and sometimes sin’s a pleasure.
~Lord Byron

As soon as beauty is sought not from religion and love, but for pleasure, it degrades the seeker.
~Annie Dillard

The greatest pleasures are only narrowly separated from disgust.
~Marcus Tullius Cicero

Pleasure only starts once the worm has got into the fruit, to become delightful happiness must be tainted with poison.
~Georges Bataille

A vice is a harm I do to myself in the pursuit of pleasure.
~Dio Lewis

An artist is an artist only because of his exquisite sense of beauty, a sense which shows him intoxicating pleasures, but which at the same time implies and contains an equally exquisite sense of all deformities and all disproportion.
~Charles Baudelaire

Pleasure can be supported by an illusion; but happiness rests upon truth.
~Sébastien-Roch Nicolas

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Posted From The Grove

Pleasure is a shadow, wealth is vanity, and power a pageant; but knowledge is ecstatic in enjoyment, perennial in frame, unlimited in space and indefinite in duration.
~De Witt Clinton

I’m doing a book, ‘Chasing Science,’ about the pleasures of science as a spectator sport.
~Frederik Pohl

The test and the use of man’s education is that he finds pleasure in the exercise of his mind.
~Jacques Barzun

Technological society has succeeded in multiplying the opportunities for pleasure, but it has great difficulty in generating joy.
~Pope Paul VI

Those, which depend on ourselves, are the only pleasures a wise man will count on: for nothing is ours which another may deprive us of. Hence the inestimable value of intellectual pleasures
~Thomas Jefferson

Let me give myself over entirely to the pleasure of conversing with my soul, since this is the only pleasure that men cannot take away from me.
~Rousseau

I am now quite cured of seeking pleasure in society, be it country or town. A sensible man ought to find sufficient company in himself.
~Emily Bronte

When from our better selves we have too long been parted by the hurrying world, and droop. Sick of its business, of its pleasures tired, how gracious, how benign is solitude.
~William Wordsworth

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.
~Aldous Huxley

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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.
~Rene Descartes

False facts are highly injurious to the progress of science, for they often endure long; but false views, if supported by some evidence, do little harm, for every one takes a salutary pleasure in proving their falseness.
~Charles Darwin

Although all the good arts serve to draw man’s mind away from vices and lead it toward better things, this function can be more fully performed by this art, which also provides extraordinary intellectual pleasure.
~Nicolaus Copernicus

Pleasures take to themselves wings and fly away; true knowledge remains forever.
~Dorothea Dix

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Pleasure is the sun of the morning, the cloud of the meridian, and the storm of the evening.
~William Scott Downey

My extravagance is my garden – it’s the first thing I look at every morning when I wake up. It gives me so much pleasure.
~Ina Garten

I also derive a great deal of pleasure from horses and dogs… the ocean… and love.
~William Shatner

People must feel that the natural world is important and valuable and beautiful and wonderful and an amazement and a pleasure.
~David Attenborough

There is pleasure in the pathless woods,
there is rapture in the lonely shore,
there is society where none intrudes,
by the deep sea, and music in its roar;
I love not Man the less,
but Nature more.
~Lord Byron

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~Casa Batllo:  This Is Not A House   (2:10)   visual poetry, astonishing for being a commercial
https://vimeo.com/555252697

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~Verb Cabin:  Finding Fury   (12:14)   Climbing up, skiing down; there are such people alive
https://vimeo.com/636725488

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~1091:  Pleasure HD   (2:37)   skiing: from crashing and burning to most creative to wildly daring
https://vimeo.com/183863520

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If you pursue good with labor, the labor passes away but the good remains; if you pursue evil with pleasure, the pleasure passes away and the evil remains.
~Marcus Tullius Cicero

When work is a pleasure, life is a joy! When work is a duty, life is slavery.
~Maxim Gorky

Work is not man’s punishment. It is his reward and his strength and his pleasure.
~George Sand

Pleasure in the job puts perfection in the work.
~Aristotle

If you’re interested in ‘balancing’ work and pleasure, stop trying to balance them. Instead make your work more pleasurable.
~Donald Trump

Your chances of success are directly proportional to the degree of pleasure you desire from what you do. If you are in a job you hate, face the fact squarely and get out.
~Michael Korda

Never permit a dichotomy to rule your life, a dichotomy in which you hate what you do so you can have pleasure in your spare time. Look for a situation in which your work will give you as much happiness as your spare time.
~Pablo Picasso

A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and gets to bed at night, and in between he does what he wants to do.
~Bob Dylan

Pleasure is labour too, and tires as much.
~William Cowper

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Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence. In other words, it is war minus the shooting.
~George Orwell

Life is essentially a cheat and its conditions are those of defeat; the redeeming things are not happiness and pleasure but the deeper satisfactions that come out of struggle.
~F Scott Fitzgerald

There are no pleasures in a fight but some of my fights have been a pleasure to win.
~Muhammad Ali

Speed, it seems to me, provides the one genuinely modern pleasure.
~Aldous Huxley

People don’t understand that it was maybe my biggest pleasure to drive an F1 car when it’s wet.
~Alain Prost

When I was in Birmingham I used to go to a place called Redwood Field. I used to get there for a two o’clock game. Where can you make this kind of money playing sports? It was just a pleasure to go out and enjoy myself and get paid for it.
~Willie Mays

I am sure that no man can derive more pleasure from money or power than I do from seeing a pair of basketball goals in some out of the way place.
~James Naismith (invented basketball)

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§ VIDEO:

We forget our pleasures, we remember our sufferings.
~Marcus Tullius Cicero

The highest pleasure is only consciousness of freedom from the deepest pain.
~James Parton

The happiest is the person who suffers the least pain; the most miserable who enjoys the least pleasure.
~Rousseau

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.
~Arthur Schopenhauer

Just another meal for one animal is the end of life for another. The circle of life is uneven.
~author unknown

To give vent now and then to his feelings, whether of pleasure or discontent, is a great ease to a man’s heart.
~Francesco Guicciardini

The truth is that we can learn to condition our minds, bodies, and emotions to link pain or pleasure to whatever we choose. By changing what we link pain and pleasure to, we will instantly change our behaviors.
~Tony Robbins

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Yea, alas, must turn to Nay,
Flesh to Clay.
Chance and Time are ever twain.
Men may scoff, and men may pray,
But they pay
Every pleasure with a pain…
~William Ernest Henley

Pleasure is a sort of oblivion, a forgetfulness. Pain is remembrance, you cannot forget pain.
~Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh

We can often endure an extra pound of pain far more easily than we can suffer the withdrawal of an ounce of accustomed pleasure.
~Sydney J Harris

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Pleasure is nothing else but the intermission of pain.
~John Selden

Human life is measured by pains and pleasures. Monotony sends us to sleep.
~Thomas Clark Henley

Pleasure and pain seem to have been accidentally cast in the same mold.
~Lewis F Korns

What we are really living for
is the experience of life,
both the pain and the pleasure.
The world is a match for us.
We are a match for the world.
~Joseph Campbell

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We have no rose without its thorn; no pleasure without alloy. It is the law of our existence; and we must acquiesce. It is the condition annexed to all our pleasures…
~Thomas Jefferson

Pleasure that isn’t paid for is as insipid as everything else that’s free.
~Anita Loos

That man is rich whose pleasures are the cheapest.
~Henry David Thoreau

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Do not bite at the bait of pleasure till you know there is no hook beneath it. The art of life is the art of avoiding pain: and he is the best pilot who steers clearest of the rocks and shoals with which it is beset
~Thomas Jefferson

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… If we do not regard as sacred our own joys and the joys of others, we open the door and let into life the ugliest attribute of the human race, which is cruelty…
~Rebecca West

A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own.
~Percy Bysshe Shelley

Pain is filtered in a poem so that it becomes finally, in the end, pleasure.
~Mark Strand

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~Omeleto:  Domestic Policy   (6:43)   the tea lady and tradition
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FuexoDLDG9E

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~Jake Nelson:  The Backward Astronomer   (10:07)   time and change
https://vimeo.com/channels/staffpicks/273062551

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~Zack Woods:  David   (11:39)   All’s well that ends…
https://vimeo.com/652309700

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I’m tired of love; I’m still more tired of rhyme;
but money gives me pleasure all the time.
~Hilaire Belloc

There are a lot of people with a lot of money, and I’m amazed they don’t understand what a great pleasure it can be to give.
~Robert Mondavi

I believe that every human mind feels pleasure in doing good to another.
~Thomas Jefferson

Business is always interfering with pleasure – but it makes other pleasures possible.
~William Feather

Pleasure is the business of the young, business the pleasure of the old.
~Fulke Greville

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Old age is a tyrant, who forbids, under pain of death, the pleasures of youth.
~Francois de La Rochefoucauld

It is with an old love as it is with old age, a man lives to all the miseries, but is dead to all the pleasures.
~Francois de La Rochefoucauld (comma added for clarity)

By recollecting the pleasures I have had formerly, I renew them, I enjoy them a second time, while I laugh at the remembrance of troubles now past, and which I no longer feel.
~Giacomo Casanova

Old age has its pleasures, which, though different, are not less than the pleasures of youth.
~W Somerset Maugham

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§ MUSIC:

Music is the pleasure the human mind experiences from counting without being aware that it is counting.
~Gottfried Leibniz

Music can also be a sensual pleasure, like eating food or sex. But its highest vibration for me is that point of taking us to a real understanding of something in our nature which we can very rarely get at. It is a spiritual state of oneness.
~Terry Riley

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No pleasure endures unseasoned by variety.
~Publilius Syrus

Pleasure is none, if not diversified.
~John Donne

Variety is the soul of pleasure.
~Behn Aphra

Variety is the mother of enjoyment.
~Benjamin Disraeli

BABYLON — where I go dreaming
When I weary of to-day,
Weary of a world grown grey.
~Ralph Hodgson

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People think I take some sort of masochistic pleasure out of putting out music that’s gonna be unpopular.
~Billy Corgan

Irresponsibility is part of the pleasure of all art; it is the part the schools cannot recognize.
~James Joyce

It gives me great pleasure indeed to see the stubbornness of an incorrigible nonconformist warmly acclaimed.
~Albert Einstein

It’s just such a pleasure to bring a talent you respect to the world.
~Tina Weymouth

The essence of all art is to have pleasure in giving pleasure.
~Dale Carnegie

Draw your pleasure, paint your pleasure, and express your pleasure strongly.
~Pierre Bonnard

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There is no pleasure to me without communication: there is not so much as a sprightly thought comes into my mind that it does not grieve me to have produced alone, and that I have no one to tell it to.
~Michel de Montaigne

The imagination is the spur of delights… all depends upon it, it is the mainspring of everything; now, is it not by means of the imagination one knows joy? Is it not of the imagination that the sharpest pleasures arise?
~Marquis de Sade

Come, come, leave business to idlers,
and wisdom to fools:
they have need of ’em:
wit be my faculty,
and pleasure my occupation,
and let father Time shake his glass.
~William Congreve

The pleasures of the imagination are as it were only drawings and models which are played with by poor people who cannot afford the real thing.
~Georg C Lichtenberg

I just like art. I get pure pleasure from it. I have a lot of wonderful paintings, and every time I look at them I see something different.
~Jack Nicholson

To the man who loves art for its own sake, it is frequently in its least important and lowliest manifestations that the keenest pleasure is to be derived.
~Arthur Conan Doyle

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Now shall I walk
Or shall I ride?
“Ride,” Pleasure said;
“Walk,” Joy replied.
Now what shall I —
Stay home or roam?
“Roam,” Pleasure said;
And Joy — “stay home.”
Now shall I dance,
Or sit for dreams?
“Sit,” answers Joy;
“Dance,” Pleasure screams.
Which of ye two
Will kindest be?
Pleasure laughed sweet,
But Joy kissed me.
~W H Davies

A test of what is real is that it is hard and rough. Joys are found in it, not pleasure. What is pleasant belongs to dreams.
~Simone Weil

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~Ray Lynch:  The Oh of Pleasure music is the same thru’out, pick your background pleasure

a liquid sound in the world of nature, the stars and water   (5:36)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jPGTAR3ODSE

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~Ken Scott:  the color of pellets, hypnotic   (5:22)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q16F5IvXmNU

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~A Dreamer’s Journey:  musical backdrop for the exotic stars that hover the sea   (5:14)   
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmFv0du8nYo

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~Casandra Woodland:  a warmer, richer quality to the sound, turn up your bass    (5:24) 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSxA4VyiKGM

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~Elle Casazza:  For Your Pleasure   (3:27)   it’s her music, not her love they’re after
https://vimeo.com/76250894

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~Pleasure Curses:  Lust   (2:50)   azure blue on pink
https://vimeo.com/124466910

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Handel’s Acis and Galatea:  Oh, the pleasure of the plains!   (2:19)   foppish opera
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y29-RdloANM

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alt-J:  Fitzpleasure   (3:41)   contortions, camera tricks and oddities
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npvNPORFXpc

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~Toro y Moi:  Ordinary Pleasure   (3:51)   a bit of joyful with the neighbors pitching in
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7hJb9MxI2NY

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~Pleasure P:  Did You Wrong   (4:37)   mutual wrongs working their way back
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YZa9vkxCw4

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~Scarlet Pleasure:  What A Life   (3:05) full and beautiful, in the key of blue
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FjVVqpZw-wg

-or-

~Scarlet Pleasure:  SOS   (3:40)   colorful whimsy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D38xTebdozs

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~Queen:  Pain Is So Close To Pleasure   (4:29)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2W2mU8R7-A

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~WARPS UP • LANGYI & MINGJUN:  Pleasure   (3:15)   Chinese w/ subtitles
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fq5wESg_Cnw

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~Jessie Ware: What’s Your Pleasure   (3:17)   sinuous music and dance
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWazsCKdlhg

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~Choral Scholars, University College Dublin: Courting Is a Pleasure (4:00) Irish folk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkupchsf06s

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~Simon & Garfunkel:  Big Bright Green Pleasure Macchine   (2:41)   nostalgia in this case
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-v6RgfD20Oo

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~DJTbagger:  World’s Dirtiest Song   (2:23)   it’s all in your head
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RgvihRmyd5o

~Postmodern Jukebox:  What Are You Doing New Year’s Eve   (4:27)   time delayed question
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EFIgMlBcKAs

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Take pleasure in your dreams; relish your principles and drape your purest feelings on the heart of a precious lover.
~Giotto di Bondone

The greatest pleasure of life is love.
~Euripides

The pleasures of love are always in proportion to our fears.
~Stendhal

Come live with me and be my love,
And we will all the pleasures prove
~Christopher Marlowe

My dreams were all my own;
I accounted for them to nobody;
they were my refuge when annoyed –
my dearest pleasure when free.
~Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

The human heart has hidden treasures,
In secret kept, in silence sealed;
The thoughts, the hopes, the dreams, the pleasures,
Whose charms were broken if revealed.
~Charlotte Bronte

I find it quite hard to sum up my relationship in a sound bite. I feel that it trivializes it for other people’s pleasure. It’s an adventure.
~Emily Blunt

Love ceases to be a pleasure when it ceases to be a secret.
~Aphra Behn

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There is no more lively sensation than that of pain; its impressions are certain and dependable, they never deceive as may those of the pleasure women perpetually feign and almost never experience.
~Marquis de Sade

It is love rather than sexual lust or unbridled sexuality if, in addition to the need or want involved, there is also some impulse to give pleasure to the persons thus loved and not merely to use them for our own selfish pleasure.
~Mortimer Adler

Love consists in giving without getting in return; in giving what is not owed, what is not due the other. That’s why true love is never based, as associations for utility or pleasure are, on a fair exchange.
~Mortimer Adler

If one could be friendly with women, what a pleasure – the relationship so secret and private compared with relations with men. Why not write about it truthfully?
~Virginia Woolf

Sensual pleasures have the fleeting brilliance of a comet; a happy marriage has the tranquillity of a lovely sunset.
~Ann Landers

O love, if I regret the age when one savors you, it is not for the hour of pleasure, but for the one that follows it.
~Jean-Jacques Rousseau

There is more pleasure in loving than in being beloved.
~Thomas Fuller

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.
~Samuel Richardson

Marriage is the miracle that transforms a kiss from a pleasure into a duty.
~Helen Rowland

Pains of love be sweeter far than all other pleasures are.
~John Dryden

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@gocomics.com

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Objects we ardently pursue bring little happiness when gained; most of our pleasures come from unexpected sources.
~Herbert Spencer

If you decide to go through life without cooking, then you are missing something very, very special. You are losing out one of the greatest pleasures you can have with your clothes on.
~Karen Anand

Lying in bed would be an altogether perfect and supreme experience if only one had a colored pencil long enough to draw on the ceiling.
~G K Chesterton

I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure.
~Clarence Darrow

Let us have wine and women, mirth and laughter.
Sermons and soda-water the day after.
~Lord Byron

~

I appreciate the ‘Surreal Life.’ I had a really positive experience on that show, and with those people. I found some love in my heart for religion again, and had the support of a new family of friends. I wouldn’t have had the pleasure of meeting those people, if we were not all placed in that fishbowl.
~Vince Neil

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.
~Karen Thompson Walker

When I portray Stabler, I have to shave every day and cut my hair every week! And then, I really like to change my looks for films like ‘Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle’ where I have the pleasure of playing the ugliest man in the world.
~Christopher Meloni

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.
~Isabelle Huppert

Most of the people who act and sing do so for their own pleasure and that of their friends and family.
~Kate Smith

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Winter Walk
© Greg Thweatt

~ ~

Subordination tends greatly to human happiness. Were we all upon an equality, we should have no other enjoyment than mere animal pleasure.
~Samuel Johnson

The pleasures of the mighty are obtained by the tears of the poor.
~Samuel Richardson

May we be saved from evil thoughts and deed of enemies of world peace who find pleasure in creating havoc and perpetrating all forms of carnage.
~Yahya Jammeh

~

I derive no pleasure from prosecuting a man, even though I know he’s guilty; do you think I could sleep at night or look at myself in the mirror in the morning if I hounded an innocent man?
~Jim Garrison

Do pleasant things yourself, but unpleasant things through others.
~Baltasar Gracian

~

Next to enjoying ourselves, the next greatest pleasure consists in preventing others from enjoying themselves, or, more generally, in the acquisition of power.
~Bertrand Russell

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.
~Bertrand Russell

Teach self-denial and make its practice pleasure, and you can create for the world a destiny more sublime that ever issued from the brain of the wildest dreamer.
~Sir Walter Scott

I am going to confront the old-fashioned negative thinking which says that all government needs to do to generate growth is cut worker and environmental protections, cut taxes on the rich and stroke ‘fat cats’ until they purr with pleasure. I’m completely repudiating the idea that government has to get out of the way.
~Vince Cable

Liberty is to the collective body, what health is to every individual body. Without health no pleasure can be tasted by man; without liberty, no happiness can be enjoyed by society.
~Henry St John

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.
~Benjamin Disraeli

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ABSTAINER, n. A weak person who yields to the temptation of denying himself a pleasure.
~Ambrose Bierce

It is the nature of the wise to resist pleasures, but the foolish to be a slave to them.
~Epictetus

Pleasure is the greatest incentive to evil.
~Plato

Sinful and forbidden pleasures are like poisoned bread; they may satisfy appetite for the moment, but there is death in them at the end.
~Tryon Edwards

People must not do things for fun. We are not here for fun. There is no reference to fun in any Act of Parliament.
~A P Herbert

How the rest of the world does hate the people who have a good time.
~Noah Lott

One half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other.
~Jane Austen

Pleasure is the object, duty and the goal of all rational creatures.
~Voltaire

Pleasure is something you can easily lose the knack of, if you allow yourself to get out of practice.
~Tom Holt

I have a great mind to believe in Christianity for the mere pleasure of fancying I may be damned.
~Lord Byron

~

God made me fast. And when I run, I feel His pleasure.
~Eric Liddell

If I err in belief that the souls of men are immortal, I gladly err, nor do I wish this error which gives me pleasure to be wrested from me while I live.
~Marcus Tullius Cicero

It is not known precisely where angels dwell whether in the air, the void, or the planets. It has not been God’s pleasure that we should be informed of their abode.
~Voltaire

~ ~

@Writers Platform

To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it’s about, but the inner music that words make.
~Truman Capote

She had always been a reader but now she was obsessed. Since her discovery of the book hoard downstairs from her job, she’d been caught up in one such collection of people and their doings after the next. The pleasure of this sort of life — bookish, she supposed it might be called, a reading life — had made her isolation into a rich and even subversive thing. She inhabited one consoling or horrifying persona after another. That she was childless and husbandless and poor meant less once she picked up a book. Her mistakes disappeared into it. She lived with an invented force.
~Louise Erdrich

The greatest pleasure when I started making money was not buying cars or yachts but finding myself able to have as many freshly typed drafts as possible.
~Gore Vidal

Every now and then I read a poem that does touch something in me, but I never turn to poetry for solace or pleasure in the way that I throw myself into prose.
~J K Rowling

Even when poetry has a meaning, as it usually has, it may be inadvisable to draw it out… Perfect understanding will sometimes almost extinguish pleasure.
~A E Housman

The end of poetry is not to create a physical condition which shall give pleasure to the mind… The end of poetry is not an after-effect, not a pleasurable memory of itself, but an immediate, constant and even unpleasant insistence upon itself.
~Laura Riding

Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth.
~Samuel Johnson

A tragedy need not have blood and death; it’s enough that it all be filled with that majestic sadness that is the pleasure of tragedy.
~Jean Racine

The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.
~Jane Austen

I try to read for pleasure whenever I can – it’s a great way just to shut it off for a while so your brain doesn’t get fried.
~Hillary Clinton

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§ GLASS TABLE:
~bckpakr: excerpt • Trip to Greece

As we stayed close to the Greek coastline, we would pass little islands that were the cliche of ‘desert islands’. They looked like little sandhills popping out of the Aegean blue waters, some with a single palm tree growing the middle and some with 3 or 4, and there were many of these!

As we drew into the Port of Patras (Patrai), I saw something I’d never seen before with my own eyes.
The sun was behind the hills and mountains of Patras, and while everything around us was bursting in color!

I looked at the port where people scrambling below us like tiny ants, and the light was so bright that the hills nearest appeared black to me, then the taller hills behind them were a lighter shade of that darkness, and the hills behind them – grey, and it kept going like this until the hills and mountains disappeared into the sunlight. I had never seen anything so beautiful before! It was like a Japanese art painting!

After we’d all departed from the ship and unloaded in Patras, I had to remind myself that all I had, in information, on my brother’s location was that he had – once – sent a postcard from a town named ‘Skala’, in Greece.

The problem was due to the similarity of so many towns’ names there. I was looking for a town called ‘Skala’, and when I looked at the map I saw there were a ton of Skalas, probably because Skala in Greek means ‘stairs’, and this describes the topography of those towns situated on hills sloping towards the coastline.

So I chose first from the map, ‘Skala Ouropou’ (stairs of gold?), in the north of Greece; above Athens yet below Thessaloniki on the northern mainland. There I met a girl who was serving as a waitress at a beach-bar, so I walked across the sand and asked her about a town named Skala – only – as a ‘single-name’ town. 

She thought for a minute and said in the best English she could, “I don’t know if it really exist, but it is, how you say in English, ‘legend’? – but I think there is a town on the south-west coast of the southern mainland, but it is very small and I don’t know if it really exist!”

Her information was good enough for me! I picked up my backpack, hitch-hiked down to Athens, had a couple of hairy experiences on the way there, continued on into the southern region and down past the city of Tripolis, and made my way slowly around the most picturesque and beautiful Greek coastlines you can imagine!

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Good fellowship and friendship are lasting, rational and manly pleasures.
~William Wycherley

Talk is by far the most accessible of pleasures. It costs nothing in money, it is all profit, it completes our education, founds and fosters our friendships, and can be enjoyed at any age and in almost any state of health.
~Robert Louis Stevenson

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.
~Alice Duer Miller

Close friends contribute to our personal growth. They also contribute to our personal pleasure, making the music sound sweeter, the wine taste richer, the laughter ring louder because they are there.
~Judith Viorst

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Eating is not merely a material pleasure. Eating well gives a spectacular joy to life and contributes immensely to goodwill and happy companionship. It is of great importance to the morale.
~Elsa Schiaparelli

Nothing would be more tiresome than eating and drinking if God had not made them a pleasure as well as a necessity.
~Voltaire

I refuse to spend my life worrying about what I eat. There is no pleasure worth forgoing just for an extra three years in the geriatric ward.
~John Mortimer

The only break I ever took was to eat. That’s all I did. Work, and then quickly eat something. It became my main pleasure, having access to my comfort food.
~John Prescott

I don’t categorize food as bad or a guilty pleasure.
~Rachael Ray

They eat the dainty food of famous chefs with the same pleasure with which they devour gross peasant dishes, mostly composed of garlic and tomatoes, or fisherman’s octopus and shrimps, fried in heavily scented olive oil on a little deserted beach.
~Luigi Barzini

When I eat with my friends, it is a moment of real pleasure, when I really enjoy my life.
~Monica Bellucci

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Prewritten Prompt:   pleasure

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Pleasure and self-discipline must stay close friends.
~Terri Guillemets

Pleasures are like liqueurs: they must be drunk but in small glasses.
~Romainville

The less we indulge our pleasures the more we enjoy them.
~Juvenal

If one oversteps the bounds of moderation, the greatest pleasures cease to please.
~Epictetus

The choicest pleasures of life lie within the ring of moderation.
~Martin Tupper

A life of pleasure makes even the strongest mind frivolous at last.
~Edward Bulwer-Lytton

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§ THE EXERCISE

Violation

I take no pleasure
in the reason for your anger
I take your measure
and the level of my danger
I see you bitter
overwrought, bedeviled
mad distraught, begin to froth
raving and disheveled
I’ll sleep outside
with the stars tonight
underneath the willow
And know next time, next party night
not to spill it, hug and call you
my only Snuggle Pillow

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Question #28

Twice the measure
at half the pleasure
out of pocket
Or twice the pleasure
at half the measure
out of love

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recipe #28

smile the while
there’s a rhythm in the writing
finding pleasure in the flavors
feeling textures on the tongue
subtle shadings while savoring
mobile shapings in the meaning
the spice and moist umami
of multi-dimensional words

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a viewing

pull the curtain on artwork
clothed or shower ready
pleasures of the eye
which side of the curtain is that
on a scale of Beastly to Beauty

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5s & 7s

name’s a favorite
knew ’twas you on the instant
great pleasure, meeting
the unearthing of treasure
shared discovery with you

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how friendly the thought
sad pleasure of letting go
kept in reserve, tho
last resort, the escape hatch
another day to get thru

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been-there Audience
perceptive, shrewd, paid Their dues
step up, you’re on stage
drama, pleasure, comedy
lensed to the curious stars

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rivers that ripple
roaring, writhing thru landscapes
wriggling with pleasure
love, at the edge where they touch
lives in weather, or nought

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happiness christmas
pleasures of celebration
marry the new year

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sensual cravings
sexual pleasures on tap
but first make me laugh

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love’s extravagance
pleasures of purple passion
late acting poisons

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contrary pleasure
you, the clock and a deadline
pressure’s …told you so

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no tread on me tires
worn out, exhausted, retired
don’t tread on me tired

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forbidden pleasure
foreshadowing death’s leisure
mid-afternoon nap

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The Olio and Salmagundi of Quotes

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!
~Charles Dickens

If you write satire, the guilty pleasure these days is that there’s just so much material about. On the other hand, if you have a family it can be depressing.
~Carl Hiaasen

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I am now quite cured of seeking pleasure in society, be it country or town. A sensible man ought to find sufficient company in himself.
~Emily Bronte

When from our better selves we have too long been parted by the hurrying world, and droop. Sick of its business, of its pleasures tired, how gracious, how benign is solitude.
~William Wordsworth

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Poor is the man whose pleasures depend on the permission of another.
~Madonna Ciccone

A great pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do.
~Walter Bagehot

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The greatest and noblest pleasure which men can have in this world is to discover new truths; and the next is to shake off old prejudices.
~Frederick II of Prussia

The greatest pleasure I know is to do a good action by stealth and to have it found out by accident.
~Charles Lamb

Everyone is dragged on by their favorite pleasure.
~Virgil

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There is no such thing as pure pleasure; some anxiety always goes with it.
~Ovid

If pleasures are greatest in anticipation, just remember that this is also true of trouble.
~Elbert Hubbard

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The Olio
Quotes Harvested:  https://bqotd.com,  https://dailypnut.com, https://www.quotegarden.com, https://wisesayings.com,  https://wordsmith.com

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The Salmagundi
Video Harvest:  https://vimeo.com,  https://youtube.com

…with a bow to the WordPress chat and happiness engineers for their unfailing patience in helping me

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