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Music is the only sensual pleasure without vice.
Sep 17, 2025
At the movies, we are gradually being conditioned to accept violence as a sensual pleasure. The directors used to say they were showing us its real face and how ugly it was in order to sensitize us to its horrors. You don't have to be very keen to see that they are now in fact desensitizing us.
Did I feel a physical desire for him? I did. Was I moved by a passion of my body? I was. Have I experienced the most violent form of sensual pleasure? I have.
Melancholy is a sensual pleasure that is deliberately provoked. How many people shut themselves away to make themselves sadder, or to weep beside a stream, or choose a sentimental book! We are constantly building and unbuilding ourselves.
Roses by the head, jasmine at the feet so appear the longings that have passed without being satisfied, not one of them granted a night of sensual pleasure, or one of its radiant mornings.
All history attests that man has subjected woman to his will, used her as a means to promote his selfish gratification, to minister to his sensual pleasures, to be instrumental in promoting his comfort; but never has he desired to elevate her to that rank she was created to fill. He has done all he could to debase and enslave her mind; and now he looks triumphantly on the ruin he has wrought, and say, the being he has thus deeply injured is his inferior.
You must be mistaken," Isabel said, unconcerned by the insult that the words carried. "I assure you i am not. Voluptas is nearly always portrayed wrapped in roses. If that were not enough, her faces confirms her identity." "You cannot tell a goddess from a face carved in marble," she scoffed. "You can tell Voluptas by her face." "I've never even heard of this goddess, and you know what she looks like?" "She is the goddess of sensual pleasure." Isabel's mouth fell open at the words. She could not think of a single thing to say in response. "Oh
Soar back through all your own experiences. Think of how the Lord has led you in the wilderness and has fed and clothed you every day. How God has borne with your ill manners, and put up with all your murmurings and all your longings after the 'sensual pleasures of Egypt!' Think of how the Lord's grace has been sufficient for you in all your troubles.
Music can also be a sensual pleasure, like eating food or sex. But its highest vibration for me is that point of taking us to a real understanding of something in our nature which we can very rarely get at. It is a spiritual state of oneness.
Sensual pleasure passes and vanishes, but the friendship between us, the mutual confidence, the delight of the heart, the enchantment of the soul, these things do not perish and can never be destroyed.
If one wants another only for some self-satisfaction, usually in the form of sensual pleasure, that wrong desire takes the form of lust rather than love.
When the cup of any sensual pleasure is drained to the bottom, there is always poison in the dregs.
You need the practice of mindfulness to bring your mind back to the body and establish yourself in the moment. If you are fully present, you need only make a step or take a breath in order to enter the kingdom of God. And once you have the kingdom, you don't need to run after objects of your craving, like power, fame, sensual pleasure, and so on. Peace is possible. Happiness is possible.
Men who could willingly resign the luxuries and sensual pleasures of a large fortune cannot consent to live without the grandeur and the homage.
The moral virtues, without religion are but cold, lifeless, and insipid; it is only religion which opens the mind to great conceptions, fills it with the most sublime ideas, and warms the soul with more than sensual pleasures.
Almost every sin is committed for the sake of sensual pleasure; and sensual pleasure is overcome by hardship and distress arising either voluntarily from repentance, or else involuntarily as a result of some salutary and providential reversal. 'For if we would judge ourselves, we should not be judged; but when we are judged, we are chastened by the Lord, so that we should not be condemned with the world.' (1 Cor. 11:31-32).
The taste of chocolate is a sensual pleasure in itself, existing in the same world as sex... For myself, I can enjoy the wicked pleasure of chocolate... entirely by myself. Furtiveness makes it better.
Though selfishness hath defiled the whole man, yet sensual pleasure is the chief part of its interest, and, therefore, by the senses it commonly works; and these are the doors and windows by which iniquity entereth into the soul.
In politics continental Europe was infantile - horrifying. What America lacked, for all its political stability, was the capacity to enjoy intellectual pleasures as though they were sensual pleasures. This is what Europe offered, or was said to offer.
Wine is a sensual pleasure. Its real value is when it splashes into the glass. It is not in the category of a Degas painting. The point is not for people to go to their cellar and stroke their bottles.
Sensual pleasures are like soap bubbles, sparkling, effervescent. The pleasures of intellect are calm, beautiful, sublime, ever enduring and climbing upward to the borders of the unseen world.
I remember when my mother taught me about my menstrual cycle and pregnancy. She, like millions of other mothers before and since, did not have the words or the experience to teach me about the miraculous cycle in my body - the cycle that is responsible for all human life on our planet and connects us to the moon and the tides. Nor did she have the words to teach me about the gift of sensual pleasure that is the birthright of all girls. If she had, my life surely would have been different. For one, I probably would not have suffered from devastating menstrual cramps for decades.
To an American the whole purpose of living, the one constant confirmation of continued existence, is to cram as much as sensual pleasure as possible into one's mouth more or less continuously. Gratification, instant and lavish, is a birthright
Don't indulge in careless behaviour. Don't be the friend of sensual pleasures. He who meditates attentively attains abundant joy.
Sensual pleasures have the fleeting brilliance of a comet; a happy marriage has the tranquillity of a lovely sunset.
One half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other.
It is a basic human need that everyone wants to live a happy life. For this, one has to experience real happiness. The so-called happiness that one experiences by having money, power, and indulging in sensual pleasures is not real happiness. It is very fragile, unstable and fleeting. For real happiness, for lasting stable happiness, one has to make a journey deep within oneself and get rid of all the unhappiness stored in the deeper levels of the mind. As long as there is misery at the depth of the mind all attempts to feel happy at the surface level of the mind prove futile.
A great pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do.
Physical pleasure is a sensual experience no different from pure seeing or the pure sensation with which a fine fruit fills the tongue; it is a great unending experience, which is given us, a knowing of the world, the fullness and the glory of all knowing. And not our acceptance of it is bad; the bad thing is that most people misuse and squander this experience and apply it as a stimulant at the tired spots of their lives and as distraction instead of a rallying toward exalted moments.
What is called a high standard of living consists, in considerable measure, in arrangements for avoiding muscular energy, for increasing sensual pleasure and enhancing caloric intake above any conceivable nutritional requirement.
The act of conducting in itself, of waving my arms in the air and being in charge, I didn't miss. I missed the sensual pleasure of being in contact with music.
Real love is the love that sometimes arises after sensual pleasure: if it does, it is immortal; the other kind inevitably goes stale, for it lies in mere fantasy.
When all the archetypes burst out shamelessly, we plumb the depths of Homeric profundity. Two clichés make us laugh but a hundred clichés moves us because we sense dimly that the clichés are talking among themselves, celebrating a reunion. . . . Just as the extreme of pain meets sensual pleasure, and the extreme of perversion borders on mystical energy, so too the extreme of banality allows us to catch a glimpse of the Sublime.
The anticipation and dread he felt at seeing her was also a kind of sensual pleasure, and surrounding it, like an embrace, was a general elation--it might hurt, it was horribly inconvenient, no good might come of it, but he had found out for himself what it was to be in love, and it thrilled him.
We are determined not to take as the aim of our life fame, profit, wealth, or sensual pleasure, nor to accumulate wealth while millions are hungry and dying. We are committed to living simply and sharing our time, energy, and material resources with those who are in need.
Perhaps Westerners are in a better position to practice true renunciation than uneducated Orientals because most Western people, by the time they come to the Dharma, have led a pretty full worldly life with lots of sensual pleasures, money and lots of toys to play with. They have seen that the path of accumulation of worldly treasure does not lead to happiness or contentment. That's why they come to the Dharma.
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