As for spiritual pleasures—they grow weaker or stronger according to the passion. For example, after six months passed in the study of astronomy you like astronomy all the more, and after a year of avarice money is still sweeter.
Spiritual pains are softened by time—how many widows, really inconsolable, console themselves with time!—Vide Lady Waldegrave—Horace Walpole.
Given a man in a state of indifference—now let him have a pleasure;
Given another man in a state of poignant suffering—suddenly let the suffering cease;
Now is the pleasure this man feels of the same nature as that of the other? M. Verri[(66)] says Yes, but, to my mind—No.
Not all pleasures come from cessation of pain.
A man had lived for a long time on an income of six thousand francs—he wins five hundred thousand in the lottery. He had got out of the way of having desires which wealth alone can satisfy.—And that, by the bye, is one of my objections to Paris—it is so easy to lose this habit there.
The latest invention is a machine for cutting quills. I bought one this morning and it's a great joy to me, as I cannot stand cutting them myself. But yesterday I was certainly not unhappy for not knowing of this machine. Or was Petrarch unhappy for not taking coffee?
What is the use of defining happiness? Everyone knows it—the first partridge you kill on the wing at twelve, the first battle you come through safely at seventeen....
Pleasure which is only the cessation of pain passes very quickly, and its memory, after some years, is even distasteful. One of my friends was wounded in the side by a bursting shell at the battle of Moscow, and a few days later mortification threatened. After a delay of some hours they managed to get together M. Béclar, M. Larrey and some surgeons of repute, and the result of their consultation was that my friend was informed that mortification had not set up. At the moment I could see his happiness—it was a great happiness, but not unalloyed. In the secret depth of his heart he could not believe that it was really all over, he kept reconsidering the surgeons' words and debating whether he could rely on them entirely. He never lost sight completely of the possibility of mortification. Nowadays, after eight years, if you speak to him of that consultation, it gives him pain—it brings to mind unexpectedly a passed unhappiness.