Reading Chekhov, I felt not happy, exactly, but as close to happiness as I knew I was likely to come. And it occurred to me that this was the pleasure and mystery of reading, as well as the answer to those who say that books will disappear. For now, books are still the best way of taking great art and its consolations along with us on a bus.

Non-attachment doesn’t mean you forgo possessions, pleasure, or comfort. It simply means you are at peace when those things fail to show up in your life. It means that while you can enjoy moments of ease, you are equally at peace when pain, hardship, and struggle define a given moment.

I believe that this suffering, which Miss Hale says is impressed on the countenances of the people of Milton, is but the natural punishment of dishonestly-enjoyed pleasure, at some former period of their lives. I do not look on self-indulgent, sensual people as worthy of my hatred; I simply look upon them with contempt for their poorness of character.

The instatement of the One Religion was surely the Magnates’ most cunning move: a device through which they were able to access and harness the incalculable power of the people’s spiritual fervor… Elijah could imagine the Magnates taking cold pleasure in their handicraft. Where chaos ruled, people both high and low were easy to manipulate.

When you forget what you ultimately stand for, you rejoice in blinding ignorance. Missing the bigger picture for the near pleasure is what humans and all living beings stand for. I guess there is no alternate way either. Because it is after all a game that all are destined to play until they end up dead.

Diligence and attention soon gave him the knack of it, and he strode down the street with his mouth full of harmony and his soul full of gratitude. He felt much as an astronomer feels who has discovered a new planet—no doubt, as far as strong, deep, unalloyed pleasure is concerned, the advantage was with the boy, not the astronomer.

It is a stage that all of those who are striving and competing are competing for it and it is a kind of life that if you are missing it you are one of the dead.It is a light that if you are without it you are in and ocean of darkness. It is a medicine or cure that if you are without it, your heart becomes a place of sicknesses.It is a sweetness or pleasure that if you are without it, life becomes a thing of worries and of pain.

Coming out of sleep, I had the advantage of two worlds, the layered firmament of dream and the temporal fixtures of the mind awake. I stretched luxuriously—a good and tingling sensation. It's as though the skin has shrunk in the night and one must push it out to daytime size by bulging the muscles, and there's an a itching pleasure in it.

It is regret for the absence of his loved one which causes a mourner to grieve: yet it is clear that this in itself is bearable enough; for we do not weep at their being absent or intending to be absent during their lifetime, although when they leave our sight we have no more pleasure in them. What tortures us, therefore, is an idea.

to read is to surrender oneself to an endless displacement of curiosity and desire from one sentence to another, from one action to another, from one level of a text to another. The text unveils itself before us, but never allows itself to be possessed; and instead of trying to possess it we should take pleasure in its teasing