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1 " Some people talk about other people’s failures with so much pleasure that you would swear they are talking about their own successes. "
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana
2 " But if I am wrong in thinking the human soul immortal, I am glad to be wrong; nor will I allow the mistake which gives me so much pleasure to be wrested from me as long as I live. "
― Marcus Tullius Cicero , Treatises on Friendship and Old Age
3 " You've blotted the rich form of desire from my life and left me only some vaguely eccentric behaviors that have grown up to integrate so much pleasure into the mundane world around me. What text could I write now? It's as though I cannot even remember what I once desired. All I can look for now, when I have the energy, is lost desire itself-- and I look for it by clearly inadequate means. At best such an account as I might write would read like the life of anyone else, with, now and again, a bizarre and interruptive incident, largely mysterious and completely demystified-- at least that's what it has become without the day-to-day, moment-to-moment web of wanting that you have unstrung from about my universe. Without it, all falls apart. In a single gesture you've turned me into the most ordinary of human creatures and at once left me an obsessive, pleasureless eccentric, trapped in a set of habits which no longer have reason because they no longer lead to reward. And if I had enough self-confidence, in the midst of this bland continual chaos into which you've shunted me, for hate, I should hate you. But I don't have it. "
― Samuel R. Delany , Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand
4 " Anyone I love takes away part of my freedom, but in that case it is I who wished it; and there is so much pleasure in loving that one gladly sacrifices something for its sake. Any one who loves me takes away all my freedom. Anyone who admires me (as a writer) threatens to take it away from me. I even fear those who understand me, which is why I spend so much time covering my tracks - both in my private life and in the persona I express through my books. What would have delighted me, had I loved god, is the thought that god gives nothing in return. "
― Henry de Montherlant , Les jeunes filles
5 " If we had no faults we should not take so much pleasure in noting those of others. "
― François de La Rochefoucauld , Maxims
6 " When he [Malevranche] happened to find Descartes' book entitled Man in a book shop on the rue Saint Jaques, he leafed through it, bought it and " read it with so much pleasure that he was forced at times to interrupt his reading, so loud were the beatings of his heart due to the extreme pleasure he had in doing so" . Those who never put down a book of erudition, science or philosophy, to catch their breath, so to speak, and recover from the strong emotion they experience, certainly ignore of of the most exquisite pleasures of intellectual life. "
