Pleasure

Pleasure

Pleasure describes the broad class of mental states that humans and other animals experience as positive, enjoyable, or worth seeking. It includes more specific mental states such as happiness, entertainment, enjoyment, ecstasy, and euphoria. In psychology, the pleasure principle describes pleasure as a positive feedback mechanism, motivating the organism to recreate in the future the situation which it has just found pleasurable. According to this theory, organisms are similarly motivated to avoid situations that have caused pain in the past.

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Famous quotes containing the word pleasure:

    When we say that pleasure is the end, we do not mean the pleasure of the profligate or that which depends on physical enjoyment—as some think who do not understand our teachings, disagree with them, or give them an evil interpretation—but by pleasure we mean the state wherein the body is free from pain and the mind from anxiety.
    Epicurus (c. 341–271 B.C.)

    The pleasure of eloquence is in greatest part owing often to the stimulus of the occasion which produces it,—to the magic of sympathy, which exalts the feeling of each by radiating on him the feeling of all.
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

    There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
    There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
    There is society where none intrudes
    By the deep sea, and music in its roar:
    I love not man the less, but nature more,
    George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)