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Hedonism Quotes

Browse 92 quotes about Hedonism.

Hedonism Quotes

“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.”

SexPleasureTechnologyTelevisionNoiseModernityStimulationHedonismSaturation
Book:A Naked Singularity
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“The secret tugs at my sleeve. A child looking for attention. It is not a big secret. But it is not the only one either. “Strength in numbers” they say. For they are many. Many little things that – together – weigh tonnes. And take up space. And are quite noisy. The way only a lot of whispers can make noise. And they follow me. Little secrets of omission, desire, and denial. Of indulgence, hedonism, and exploration. Of peeves, passion, and deep-seated fear. Little secrets of despair and disrepair and prohibited thoroughfare.”

RomanceDesirePassionFearRelationshipsMarriageLonelinessBrokenSorrowDespairAbuseLustDenialInsecuritySecretsInfidelityIndulgenceDisclosureHedonismUnfaithfulnessDisrepair
Book:Years: a book of tiny poetry
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“We need to be those that revere Apollo, yet do not ignore Dionysus. We must give Dionysus his due, but always in a subordinate sense to Apollo. As things stand, we live in a primitive Dionysian world where Apollo scarcely gets a look in. We need an Apollonian world by day (work hard, intelligently, rationally and logically) and a Dionysian world by night (play hard, satisfying our deepest needs in sublimated, ritualistic, and staged ways, avoiding the horror of the untamed, bestial Dionysian).”

ReasonEffortEmotionBalanceApolloHedonismDionysus
Book:Inside Reality: The Inner View of Existence
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“Many things in this period have been hard to bear, or hard to take seriously. My own profession went into a protracted swoon during the Reagan-Bush-Thatcher decade, and shows scant sign of recovering a critical faculty—or indeed any faculty whatever, unless it is one of induced enthusiasm for a plausible consensus President. (We shall see whether it counts as progress for the same parrots to learn a new word.) And my own cohort, the left, shared in the general dispiriting move towards apolitical, atonal postmodernism. Regarding something magnificent, like the long-overdue and still endangered South African revolution (a jagged fit in the supposedly smooth pattern of axiomatic progress), one could see that Ariadne’s thread had a robust reddish tinge, and that potential citizens had not all deconstructed themselves into Xhosa, Zulu, Cape Coloured or ‘Eurocentric’; had in other words resisted the sectarian lesson that the masters of apartheid tried to teach them. Elsewhere, though, it seemed all at once as if competitive solipsism was the signifier of the ‘radical’; a stress on the salience not even of the individual, but of the trait, and from that atomization into the lump of the category. Surely one thing to be learned from the lapsed totalitarian system was the unwholesome relationship between the cult of the masses and the adoration of the supreme personality. Yet introspective voyaging seemed to coexist with dull group-think wherever one peered about among the formerly ‘committed’. Traditionally then, or tediously as some will think, I saw no reason to discard the Orwellian standard in considering modern literature. While a sort of etiolation, tricked out as playfulness, had its way among the non-judgemental, much good work was still done by those who weighed words as if they meant what they said. Some authors, indeed, stood by their works as if they had composed them in solitude and out of conviction. Of these, an encouraging number spoke for the ironic against the literal mind; for the generously interpreted interest of all against the renewal of what Orwell termed the ‘smelly little orthodoxies’—tribe and Faith, monotheist and polytheist, being most conspicuous among these new/old disfigurements. In the course of making a film about the decaffeinated hedonism of modern Los Angeles, I visited the house where Thomas Mann, in another time of torment, wrote Dr Faustus. My German friends were filling the streets of Munich and Berlin to combat the recrudescence of the same old shit as I read: This old, folkish layer survives in us all, and to speak as I really think, I do. not consider religion the most adequate means of keeping it under lock and key. For that, literature alone avails, humanistic science, the ideal of the free and beautiful human being. [italics mine] The path to this concept of enlightenment is not to be found in the pursuit of self-pity, or of self-love. Of course to be merely a political animal is to miss Mann’s point; while, as ever, to be an apolitical animal is to leave fellow-citizens at the mercy of Ideolo’. For the sake of argument, then, one must never let a euphemism or a false consolation pass uncontested. The truth seldom lies, but when it does lie it lies somewhere in between.”

TruthFilmScienceReligionFaithLiteraturePoliticsUnited StatesProgressAtheismSelf LoveEnlightenmentArgumentLiesHumanismConvictionRussiaSocialismJournalismCommunismIronyGermanyLos AngelesIndividualismSouth AfricaCold WarSoviet UnionTotalitarianismCritical ThinkingOrthodoxyBerlinSelf PityApartheidPostmodernismLiterary CriticismSectarianismTribalismPopulismEuphemismHedonismMonotheismGeorge OrwellMunichGroupthinkSolipsismPolytheismThomas MannPotusRonald ReaganRadical PoliticsMargaret ThatcherRight Wing PoliticsLeft Wing PoliticsApoliticismGeorge Hw BushBought PriesthoodXhosa PeopleZulu PeopleCape ColouredsEurocentricismGerman PeoplePersonality Politics
Book:For the Sake of Argument: Essays and Minority Reports
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“Defined simply, narcissism means excessive self-preoccupation; pragmatism means excessive focus on work, achievement, and the practical concerns of life; and restlessness means an excessive greed for experience, an overeating, not in terms of food but in terms of trying to drink in too much of life...And constancy of all three together account for the fact that we are so habitually self-absorbed by heartaches, headaches, and greed for experience that we rarely find the time and space to be in touch with the deeper movements inside of and around us.”

MeditationSolitudeGreedInner PeaceLustHeartacheNarcissismAvariceHeadacheRestlessnessPragmatismHedonism
Book:The Holy Longing: The Search for a Christian Spirituality
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“Though he has watched a decent age pass by, A man will sometimes still desire the world. I swear I see no wisdom in that man. The endless hours pile up a drift of pain More unrelieved each day; and as for pleasure, When he is sunken in excessive age, You will not see his pleasure anywhere. - Choral Poem between Scenes V & VI, Oedipus at Colonus”

Human NatureHedonism
Book:The Oedipus Cycle: Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone
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“You must convince your chiefs that what you're telling 'em is important, which ain't difficult, since they want to believe you, having chiefs of their own to satisfy; make as much mystery of your methods as you can; hint what a thoroughgoing ruffian you can be in a good cause, but never forget that innocence shines brighter than any virtue, "Flashman? Extraordinary fellow - kicks 'em in the crotch with the heart of a child"; remember that silence frequently passes for shrewdness, and that while suppressio veri is a damned good servant, suggestio falsi is a perilous master.”

PhilosophyWisdomChallengesHuman NatureExperienceKnowledge Of SelfHedonismThe Way The World Works
Book:Flashman and the Dragon
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“By protecting our children from adversity, have we made them deathly afraid of it? By bolstering their self-esteem with false praise and a lack of real-world consequences, have we made them less tolerant, more entitled, and ignorant of their own character defects? By giving in to their every desire, have we encouraged a new age of hedonism?”

PainHappinessParentingAddictionHuman BrainAddiction And RecoveryDopamineChild DevelopmentHedonismPleasure And Pain
Book:Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence
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“There is a glimmer of metal that wavers between his thighs. He turns to face me. The balls of his large gauge nipple rings catch my eye as they glint in the light of the room. But, it is the tintinabular rings below that cause my eyes to descend to his shining metallic beacon of love. I feel my jaw slightly drop open and a small puff of air escapes over my lips. I am wildly transfixed. What is that? What will he do with it? I nervously wonder without a solution. He moves toward me with the sound of pockets full of change, and I know my life will never be the same.”

LoveSinWorshipExtremesBdsmHedonismSelf Discovery QuotesPoetry Of LifeAnastasiaSexologyPremarital SexBody ModificationPsychology Of SexualityAnastasia LilyAnastasia QuotesExtreme SexualityMaster Slave RelationshipsPhilosophy Of Sex
Author:Anastasia
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“Every moment was to be grasped because it would not appen again. 'This I had e had, and this, and this,' to taste life and smell it and grasp it, to bave It even if he could not hold it, knowing that be was aged and wise beyond his years, for 'When I am twenty I shall be old and the I shan't want these things,' said Julius. And every song be sang was an adieu, and every movement a gesture of farewell. He sought exhaustion in all its forms, deliberately he made a fetish of sensation and the enjoyment of unbounding health became a sensuous experience. 'If I do everything when I am nineteen I shan't want to do anything later,' be thought. If he had never known what it was to be a child, at least he would know how a big should live; and while he plunged headlong into every folly of mischief and adventure and vice, it was as though part of him stood aside, watching the figure of himself with his hands to his hips, waving good-bye to his own boyhood.”

Growing UpTeenage YearsHedonismSensationalismLiving To The Fullest
Book:Julius
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“The Hedonistic Imperative outlines how genetic engineering and nanotechnology will abolish suffering in all sentient life. This project is ambitious but technically feasible. It is also instrumentally rational and ethically mandatory. The metabolic pathways of pain and malaise evolved only because they once served the fitness of our genes. They will be replaced by a different sort of neural architecture. States of sublime well-being are destined to become the genetically pre-programmed norm of mental health. The world's last aversive experience will be a precisely dateable event.”

ReasonPhilosophyScienceSufferingTechnologyFutureEthicsFitnessGenesRationalityHedonismGenetic EngineeringFeasibility
Author:David Pearce
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“An Orwellian world is much easier to recognize, and to oppose, than a Huxleyan. Everything in our background has prepared us to know and resist a prison when the gates begin to close around us. We are not likely, for example, to be indifferent to the voices of the Sakharovs and the Timmermans and the Walesas. We take arms against such a sea of troubles, buttressed by the spirit of Milton, Bacon, Voltaire, Goethe and Jefferson. But what if there are no cries of anguish to be heard? Who is prepared to take arms against a sea of amusements? To whom do we complain, and when, and in what tone of voice, when serious discourse dissolves into giggles? What is the antidote to a culture’s being drained by laughter? I fear that our philosophers have given us no guidance in this matter.”

MediaLaughterAmusementDystopiaHedonismHuxleyOrwellPolitical DiscourseCulture CritiqueInfotainment
Book:Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business
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“С нелепото си поведение и мокасините си на бос крак (за да младее)Плейбой интернашънъл задава уместни въпроси : за какво служи любовта в цивилизацията на похотта? Защо ни трябва обременяващо семейство, щом въздигаме свободата във висша ценност? Какво е мястото на марала в хедонистично общество?Ако Бог е мъртъв, значи вселената е бордей, от който трябва да се възползвааме до пукване. Ако индивидът е цар, то егоизмът е единствената ни ценностна система.”

SexHedonismWindows On The WorldFrederic BeigdeberегоизъмNichilismиндивидътцар
Author:Frédéric Beigbeder
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“In so much firm, pleasure-loving flesh, we cannot find the merest trace of a moral nervous system. That explains the whole enigma of Casanova's subtle genius. Lucky man that he is, he has only sensuality, and lacks the first beginnings of a soul. Bound by no ties, having no fixed aim, restrained by no prudent considerations, he can move at a different tempo from his fellow mortals, who are burdened with moral scruples, who aim at an ethical goal, who are tied by notions of social responsibility. That is the secret of his unique impetus, of his incomparable energy.”

HedonismCasanovaPleasure SeekingAmoral
Book:Casanova
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“There is nothing more pleasant than rejecting hedonism, there is nothing more useful than rejecting utilitarianism, there is nothing more scientific than rejecting scientism, and there is nothing more prosocial than rejecting collectivism. In other words, there is no better way to enter into a healthy relationship with instrumental values than to reject doctrines that try to make them into intrinsic values.”

CollectivismScientismHedonismIntrinsic ValueUtilitarianismInstrumental Value
Author:Jakub Bożydar Wiśniewski
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“Despite the promises of utopian hedonism, many youth and middle-aged adults quickly enticed by these did not escape from their addictions easily, if at all. And, to the shock of their fans, the lives of Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison and numerous other acid trippin' rock musicians also ended quickly like the closing blues beats from one of their most popular songs. Even Max Yasgur himself died just 19 months after the Woodstock Festival of a heart attack at the age of 53.”

MusicDopeRock MusicHedonismWoodstock1960 S
Book:The 1960's Social Movements - Pathways to the Final Apostasy
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“Who gives a flying fuck about Q3 projections? When you are on your deathbed, rattling out your last breath, are you going to think fondly about the time you optimized the synergy of your workload? Bullshit! You’re going to think about the women you didn’t sleep with, the wine you didn’t drink, and the fights you didn’t start because you had an early meeting the next morning.”

TimeRegretPrioritiesMeaning Of LifeExistentialismMortalityCarpe DiemLife ChoicesWork Life BalanceHedonism
Book:Notes From Exile: The "Manual for the Broken”
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