#sure

In the world of animals, pain serves an equivocal role. Parental nips and swipes are common tools in upbringing. And socially, pain is sometimes used to maintain hierarchies of dominance. But this animal use of pain seems somewhat restrained, at least in contrast with the human situation. Here the capacity for pain is often used to systematically exploit and oppress at intensities often far beyond those seen in the behaviour of our nearest primate relatives. At the same time, at least in western culture, pain is rarely used for pleasure. Is it little wonder that all pain is viewed as intrinsically evil? Or that the pain-pleasure of leatherspace has been labelled torture? ↗

— Geoff Mains

#leather #pain #pleasure #bdsm

I care not that this moment’s lot was thin and sparsely dealt; all pleasures sweet can be forgot the instant they are felt. ↗

— Roman Payne

#payne #pleasure #time #roman

I set out to discover the why of it, and to transform my pleasure into knowledge. ↗

— Charles Baudelaire

#knowledge #pleasure #curiosity

Sorrow, terror, anguish, despair itself are often the chosen expressions of an approximation to the highest good. Our sympathy in tragic fiction depends on this principle; tragedy delights by affording a shadow of the pleasure which exists in pain. This is the source also of the melancholy which is inseparable from the sweetest melody. The pleasure that is in sorrow is sweeter than the pleasure of pleasure itself. ↗

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

#pleasure #melancholy

Never ask while you are doing it if what you are doing is fun. Don't introduce even your most reliably witty acquaintance as someone who will set the table on a roar. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#fun #pressure #wit #witty

The overwhelming noise we live with has made a fundamental pleasure like sex somehow less exciting, less satisfying, than it was for our libidinous forefathers and mothers. It seems to me that for sex and other pleasures to be enjoyed to the fullest, a certain contemplative quality to life must be present. If you doubt this imagine yourself for a moment having sex. Now imagine you wished to increase the pleasure you were feeling, feel it more intensely. What might you do? Well one of the things you'd probably do is close your eyes. What this does of course is shut out other stimuli. The visual quiet increases your sensual enjoyment and you concentrate more fully on the pleasure. The same is true for the removal of auditory noise as well. Well my feeling is that the average person has a much harder time doing this today than they would have decades ago. Today you close your eyes and shut off Television but the noise persists. It's part of our fabric now, our biology, and all other pleasures including sex are diminished as a result. We don't notice this derogation by the way and sex still feels great, don't get me wrong, but I think the difference is there nonetheless. Like the difference between seeing breasts when you're thirty as opposed to when you were thirteen. ↗

— Sergio De La Pava

#modernity #noise #pleasure #saturation #sex

We measure everything by ourselves with almost a necessary conceit. ↗

— Dejan Stojanovic

#conceit #dejan-stojanovic #literature #literature-quotes #measure

The idea makes a lot of people uncomfortable. [...] It's hurt a great many people and been responsible for a great deal of misery. But, to my mind at least, that doesn't mean it can't now bring pleasure to someone. ↗

— Manna Francis

#pain #pleasure #bdsm

When people bury treasure nowadays they do it in the Post-Office bank. ↗

— Arthur Conan Doyle

#sherlock-holmes

The health of a democratic society may be measured by the quality of functions performed by private citizens. ↗

— Alexis de Tocqueville

#democratic #democratic society #functions #health #may