“Some people think they can find satisfaction in good food, fine clothes, lively music, and sexual pleasure. However, when they have all these things, they are not satisfied. They realize happiness is not simply having their material needs met. Thus, society has set up a system of rewards that go beyond material goods. These include titles, social recognition, status, and political power, all wrapped up in a package called self-fulfillment. Attracted by these prizes and goaded on by social pressure, people spend their short lives tiring body and mind to chase after these goals. Perhaps this gives them the feeling that they have achieved something in their lives, but in reality they have sacrificed a lot in life. They can no longer see, hear, act, feel, or think from their hearts. Everything they do is dictated by whether it can get them social gains. In the end, they've spent their lives following other people's demands and never lived a life of their own. How different is this from the life of a slave or a prisoner?”
“"Reading history is good for all of us," he says, not surprisingly, perhaps, but his rationale is a fresh, somewhat bracing thought: "If you know history, you know that there is no such thing as a self-made man or self-made woman. We are shaped by people we have never met. Yes, reading history will make you a better citizen and more appreciative of the law, and of freedom, and of how the economy works or doesn't work, but it is also an immense pleasurethe way art is, or music is, or poetry is. And it's never stale."”
“Grace is always natural, though that does not prevent its being often used to hide a lie. The rude shocks and uncomfortably constraining influences of life disappear among graceful women and poetical men; they are the most deceptive beings in creation; distrust and doubt cannot stand before them; they create what they imagine; if they do not lie to others, they do to their own hearts; for illusion is their element, fiction their vocation, and pleasures in appearance their happiness. Beware of grace in woman, and poetry in man -- weapons the more dangerous because the least dreaded!”
When we mourn those who die young – those who have been robbed of time – we weep for lost joys. We weep for opportunities and pleasure we ourselves have never known. We feel sure that somehow that young body would have known the yearning delight for which we searched in vain all our lives. We believe that the untried soul, trapped in its young prison, might have flown free and known the joy that we still seek.
i love playing and chatting with children...feeding and putting them to bed with a little story, and being away from the family has troubled me throughout my...life. i like relaxing at the house, reading quietly, taking in the sweet smell that comes from the pots, sitting around a table with the family and taking out my wife and children. when you can no longer enjoy these simple pleasures something valuable is taken away from your life and you feel it in your daily work.
But is the unicorn a falsehood? It's the sweetest of animals and a noble symbol. It stands for Christ and for chastity; it can be captured only by setting a virgin in the forest, so that the animal, catching her most chaste odor, will go and lay its head in her lap, offering itself as prey to the hunters' snares.""So it is said, Adso. But many tend to believe that it's a fable, an invention of the pagans.""What a disappointment," I said. "I would have liked to encounter one, crossing a wood. Otherwise what's the pleasure of crossing a wood?
Christians are usually sincere and well-intentioned people until you get to any real issues of ego, control power, money, pleasure, and security. Then they tend to be pretty much like everybody else. We often given a bogus version of the Gospel, some fast-food religion, without any deep transformation of the self; and the result has been the spiritual disaster of "Christian" countries that tend to be as consumer-oriented, proud, warlike, racist, class conscious, and addictive as everybody else-and often more so, I'm afraid.
Only eight months had gone since Henry VIII of England had been suspended in death, there to lie like Mohammed’s coffin, hardly in the Church nor out of it, attended by his martyrs and the acidulous fivefold ghosts of his wives. King Francis of France, stranded by his neighbour’s death in the midst of a policy so advanced, so brilliant and so intricate that it should at last batter England to the ground, and be damned to the best legs in Europe—Francis, bereft of these sweet pleasures, dwindled and died likewise.
Without the errors which are active in every psychical pleasure and displeasrue a humanity would never have come into existence--whose fundamental feeling is and remains that man is the free being in a world of unfreedom, the external miracle worker whether he does good or ill, the astonishing exception, the superbeast and almost-god, the meaning of creation which cannot be thought away, the solution of the cosmic riddle, the mighty ruler over nature and the despiser of it, the creature which calls its history world history!--Vanitas vanitatum homo.
Lady Placida smiled. “History seldom takes note of serendipity when it records events. And from what I have heard, I suspect an argument could be made that you very much did earn the title.”“Many women have earned titles, Your Grace. It doesn't seem to have been a factor in whether or not they actually received them.”Lady Placida laughed. “True enough. But perhaps that is beginning to change.” She offered her hands. “It is a distinct pleasure to meet you, Steadholder.