A Quote by Andrew Solomon

There is a line that I always loved from Lucretius. He said, "The sublime is the art of exchanging easier for more difficult pleasures." The presumption of that formulation is that the more difficult pleasures are actually better than the easier pleasures. That is why one makes the exchange.

Andrew Solomon

Quote Topics

Actually Always Art Better Difficult Easier Exchange Exchanging Line Loved Makes More Pleasures Presumption Said Sublime Than Why

Quote Author

Andrew Solomon
American - Writer

The morality of scholarship, as currently practiced, is to encourage everyone to replace difficult pleasures by pleasures universally accessible precisely because they are easier.

Harold Bloom

The art of life lies in taking pleasures as they pass, and the keenest pleasures are not intellectual, nor are they always moral.

Aristippus

Sensual pleasures are like soap bubbles, sparkling, effervescent. The pleasures of intellect are calm, beautiful, sublime, ever enduring and climbing upward to the borders of the unseen world.

John H Aughey

I fear this is not the right exchange to attain virtue, to exchange pleasures for pleasures, pains for pains and fears for fears, the greater for the less like coins, but that the only valid currency for which all these things should be exchanged is wisdom.

Plato

Your Heavenly body is going to be an awful lot like it is now, only better. And if you enjoy its pleasures now, think how marvelous they're going to be when your body is supernatural, really super, with more power and more beauty and more grace and greater thrills and more marvelous exciting experiences and love than ever!-All the pleasures of this life and Heaven too, and their continuation on the other side!

David Berg

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

W. Somerset Maugham

In my twenties, my pleasures tended to be physical. In my thirties, my pleasures tended to be intellectual. I can't say which was more exquisite.

Steve Kangas

Devotion to the facts will always give the pleasures of recognition; adherence to the rules of design, the pleasures of order and certainty.

Kenneth Clark

No pleasure is evil in itself; but the means by which certain pleasures are gained bring pains many times greater than the pleasures.

Epicurus

There is not a little generalship and stratagem required in the managing and marshalling of our pleasures, so that each shall not mutually encroach to the destruction of all. For pleasures are very voracious, too apt to worry one another, and each, like Aaron's serpent, is prone to swallow up the rest. Thus drinking will soon destroy the power, gaming the means, and sensuality the taste, for other pleasures less seductive, but far more salubrious, and permanent as they are pure.

Charles Caleb Colton

Aesthetic value emanates from the struggle between texts: in the reader, in language, in the classroom, in arguments within a society. Aesthetic value rises out of memory, and so (as Nietzsche saw) out of pain, the pain of surrendering easier pleasures in favour of much more difficult ones ... successful literary works are achieved anxieties, not releases from anxieties.

Harold Bloom

The enjoyment we get from something is powerfully influenced by what we think that thing really is. This is true for intellectual pleasures, such as the appreciation of paintings and stories, and it is true as well for pleasures that seem simpler and more animalistic, such as the satisfaction of hunger and lust.

Paul Bloom

In politics continental Europe was infantile - horrifying. What America lacked, for all its political stability, was the capacity to enjoy intellectual pleasures as though they were sensual pleasures. This is what Europe offered, or was said to offer.