Hedonism Quotes

“You can live to be a hundred if you give up all the things that make you want to live to be a hundred.”
― Woody Allen

“I was drawn to all the wrong things: I liked to drink, I was lazy, I didn't have a god, politics, ideas, ideals. I was settled into nothingness; a kind of non-being, and I accepted it. I didn't make for an interesting person. I didn't want to be interesting, it was too hard. What I really wanted was only a soft, hazy space to live in, and to be left alone. On the other hand, when I got drunk I screamed, went crazy, got all out of hand. One kind of behavior didn't fit the other. I didn't care.”
― Charles Bukowski, Women

“Punctuality is the thief of time”
― Oscar Wilde

“I finally figured out the only reason to be alive is to enjoy it.”
― Rita Mae Brown

“The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“I exist only as a whole; my only claim is to be natural, and the pleasure I feel in an action, I take as a sign that I ought to do it.”
― André Gide, The Immoralist

“I predict we will abolish suffering throughout the living world. Our descendants will be animated by gradients of genetically pre-programmed well-being that are orders of magnitude richer than today's peak experiences.”
― David Pearce, The Hedonistic Imperative

“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.”
― Frédéric Beigbeder

“I have a horror of rest; possessions encourage one to indulge in it, and there's nothing like security for making one fall asleep; I like life well enough to live it awake, and so, in the very midst of my riches, I maintain the sensation of a state of precariousness, by which means I aggravate, or at any rate intensify, my life. I will not say I like danger, but I like life to be hazardous, and I want it to demand at every moment the whole of my courage, my happiness, my health...”
― André Gide, The Immoralist

“Lust for possession and greed has ravaged the soul of humanity like a great cancer, metastasizing throughout society in the form of a nouveau post-human, consumer hedonism.”
― Bryant McGill, Voice of Reason

“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?”
― Anna Lembke, Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence

“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).”
― Thomas Stark, Inside Reality: The Inner View of Existence

“I’m claiming the right to be
unhappy.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“The best kind of pleasure comes from the indifference to pain … and pleasure.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“The paradox is that hedonism, the pursuit of pleasure for its own sake,
leads to anhedonia, which is the inability to enjoy pleasure of any kind.”
― Anna Lembke, Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence

“An ejaculation is a waste of nutrients, unless it leads to pregnancy … and intentionally.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“These were his kind of people: hedonists. Honest and unafraid to surrender to who they truly were.”
― Larry Fort, Tales of the Sibling Not-So-Grim

“I'm an Epicurean hedonist. The meaning of life is to enjoy my life.”
― Oliver Markus Malloy, Inside The Mind of an Introvert

“The new hedonism seems unable to give people a reason to go on living. Its earliest fruits appear to be poisonous. Will this new "liberating" culture that our young have so enthusiastically embraced prove the deadliest carcinogen of them all? And if the West is in the grip of a "culture of death," as the pope contends and the statistics seem to show, is Western civilization about to follow Lenin's empire to the same inglorious end?”
― Patrick J. Buchanan, The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization

“Opium! dread agent of unimaginable pleasure and pain! I had heard of it as I had of manna or of ambrosia, but no further. How unmeaning a sound was it at that time: what solemn chords does it now strike upon my heart! What heart-quaking vibrations of sad and happy remembrances!”
― Thomas de Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium Eater

“Over time, existentialism gave way to hedonism as I made pleasure into my God. Using pleasure to fill the gap that my empty worldview created. Even though I said I was my own authority and I acted like the world revolved around me, my actions revolved around whatever gave me pleasure. My feelings were the real authority of my life.”
― Michael J Heil, Pursued: God’s relentless pursuit and a drug addict’s journey to finding purpose

“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.”
― Jakub Bożydar Wiśniewski

“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.”
― Daphne du Maurier, Julius

“Hedonism is based on the illusion that what we enjoy inevitably leaves us in joy.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“As for the present-day Festivals they were endless--blurred--going on forever so that no one knew where one had ended in the next begun.”
― Timothy Findley, Not Wanted on the Voyage

“Shrovetides, May Days, Carnivals - these permitted a direct experience of the animal otherness underlying personal and social identity.”
― Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception / Heaven and Hell

“Become a martyr of deliciousness”
― Sabrina Angelina

“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.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“Just imagine it: no longer feeling guilty for everything you have and don't deserve, for an unjust world bent in your favor, paying the piper at last. Wasn't it worth it, after all? My head on a pike for this sweet, short, pleasure-drenched life.”
― Kim Fu, Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century

“If the fear of death were merely the fear of dying, it would be better dealt with by medicine than by argument. There is, or there might be, an art of dying well, of dying painlessly, willingly, and in season,—as in those noble partings which Attic gravestones depict,—especially if we were allowed, as Lucretius would allow us, to choose our own time.

But the radical fear of death, I venture to think, is something quite different. It is the love of life. Epicurus, who feared life, seems to have missed here the primordial and colossal force he was fighting against. Had he perceived that force, he would have been obliged to meet it in a more radical way, by an enveloping movement, as it were, and an attack from the rear. The love of life is not something rational, or founded on experience of life. It is something antecedent and spontaneous. It is that Venus Genetrix which covers the earth with its flora and fauna. It teaches every animal to seek its food and its mate, and to protect its offspring; as also to resist or fly from all injury to the body, and most of all from threatened death. It is the original impulse by which good is discriminated from evil, and hope from fear.

Nothing could be more futile, therefore, than to marshal arguments against that fear of death which is merely another name for the energy of life, or the tendency to self-preservation. Arguments involve premises, and these premises, in the given case, express some particular form of the love of life; whence it is impossible to conclude that death is in no degree evil and not at all to be feared. For what is most dreaded is not the agony of dying, nor yet the strange impossibility that when we do not exist we should suffer for not existing. What is dreaded is the defeat of a present will directed upon life and its various undertakings. Such a present will cannot be argued away, but it may be weakened by contradictions arising within it, by the irony of experience, or by ascetic discipline. To introduce ascetic discipline, to bring out the irony of experience, to expose the self-contradictions of the will, would be the true means of mitigating the love of life; and if the love of life were extinguished, the fear of death, like smoke rising from that fire, would have vanished also.”
― George Santayana, Three Philosophical Poets: Lucretius, Dante And Goethe