Pleasure, or wrong or rightly understood,
Our greatest evil, or our greatest good.
—Pope.
People should be guarded against temptation to unlawful pleasures by furnishing them the means of innocent ones. In every community there must be pleasures, relaxations, and means of agreeable excitement; and if innocent are not furnished, resort will be had to criminal. Man was made to enjoy as well as labor, and the state of society should be adapted to this principle of human nature.—Channing.
Mental pleasures never cloy; unlike those of the body, they are increased by repetition, approved of by reflection, and strengthened by enjoyment.—Colton.
I should rejoice if my pleasures were as pleasing to God as they are to myself.—Marguerite de Valois.
We tire of those pleasures we take, but never of those we give.—J. Petit-Senn.
Mistake not. Those pleasures are not pleasures that trouble the quiet and tranquillity of thy life.—Jeremy Taylor.
Poetry.—True poetry, like the religious prompting itself, springs from the emotional side of a man's complex nature, and is ever in harmony with his highest intuitions and aspirations.—Epes Sargent.
Then, rising with aurora's light,
The muse invoked, sit down to write;
Blot out, correct, insert, refine,
Enlarge, diminish, interline;
Be mindful, when invention fails,
To scratch your head and bite your nails.
—Swift.
It is uninspired inspiration.—Henry Reed.
Poetry is the blossom and the fragrance of all human knowledge, human thoughts, human passions, emotions, language.—Coleridge.