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Quote by Anna Lembke

“Human beings, the ultimate seekers, have responded too well to the challenge of pursuing pleasure and avoiding pain. As a result, we’ve transformed the world from a place of scarcity to a place of overwhelming abundance.”

Book:Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence

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Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence

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Anna Lembke

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“The phylogenetically uber-ancient neurological machinery for processing pleasure and pain has remained largely intact throughout evolution and across species. It is perfectly adapted for a world of scarcity. Without pleasure we wouldn’t eat, drink, or reproduce. Without pain we wouldn’t protect ourselves from injury and death. By raising our neural set point with repeated pleasures, we become endless strivers, never satisfied with what we have, always looking for more.”

Pain Pleasure Neuroscience Scarcity Pain And Pleasure Dopamine

Book:Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence

Source: Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence

“Between the pleasure of a kiss and of what a man and woman do in bed seems to me only a gradation. A kiss, for instance, is not to be minimized, or its value judged by anyone else. I wonder do these men grade their pleasure in terms of whether their actions produce a child or not, and do they consider them more pleasant if they do. It is a question of pleasure after all, and what's the use debating the pleasure of an ice cream cone versus a football gamme--or a Beethoven quartet versus the Mona Lisa. I'll leave that to the philosophers. But their attitude was that I must be somehow demented or blind (plus a kind of regret, I thought, at the fact that a fairly attractive woman is presumably unavailable to men). [...] The most important point I did not mention and was not thought of by anyone--that the rapport between two men or two women can be absolute and perfect, as it can never be between man and woman, and perhaps some people want just this, as others want that more shifting and uncertain thing that happens between men and women. It was said or at least implied yesterday that my present course would bring me to the depths of human vice and degeneration. Yes, I have sunk a good deal since they took you from me. It is true, if I were to go on like this and be spied upon, attacked, never possessing one person long enough so that knowledge of a person is a superficial thing--that is degeneration. Or to live against one's grain, that is degeneration by definition.”

Pleasure Attitude Vice Rapport Demented Degeneration Philosophers

Book:The Price of Salt

Source: The Price of Salt

“He was not yet in the Church, but already a sin without a name had occurred to him. Ordinarily, the thought might give him pleasure. He remembered Nunes saying that a man must come into the Church on his own intellectual level. And in a horror, remote but clear, saw that the more intelligent a man was, the more various the sins he was capable of committing.”

Sin Pleasure Intellectual Catholic Intelligence Sinful

Book:Dayspring

Source: Dayspring

“But, alas! I feel it too sadly. I am alone the cause of my own woe, am I not? Truly, my own bosom contains the source of all my sorrow, as it previously contained the source of all my pleasure.”

Pleasure Sorrow

Book:The Sorrows of Young Werther

Source: The Sorrows of Young Werther

Quote by Anna Lembke

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