In the queerest way, pleasure and disgust are linked together. The human body is beautiful: it is also repulsive and ridiculous, a fact which can be verified at any swimming pool. The sexual organs are objects of desire and also of loathing, so much so that in many languages, if not in all languages, their names are used as words of abuse. Meat is delicious, but a butcher’s shop makes one feel sick: and indeed all our food springs ultimately from dung and dead bodies, the two things which of all others seem to us the most horrible. A child, when it is past the infantile stage but still looking at the world with fresh eyes, is moved by horror almost as often as by wonder – horror of snot and spittle, of the dogs’ excrement on the pavement, the dying toad full of maggots, the sweaty smell of grown-ups, the hideousness of old men, with their bald heads and bulbous noses.
In his endless harping on disease, dirt and deformity, Swift is not actually inventing anything, he is merely leaving something out.

George Orwell (1903-1950) English writer [pseud. of Eric Arthur Blair]
Essay (1946-09), “Politics vs. Literature: An Examination of Gulliver’s Travels,” Polemic, No. 5

Sourcing, notes: wist.info/orwell-george/76157/

WIST Quotations · Apr 11Essay (1946-09), "Politics vs. Literature: An Examination of Gulliver's Travels," Polemic, No. 5 - Orwell, George | WIST QuotationsIn the queerest way, pleasure and disgust are linked together. The human body is beautiful: it is also repulsive and ridiculous, a fact which can be verified at any swimming pool. The sexual organs are objects of desire and also of loathing, so much so that in many languages, if…

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**WIST Quotations** @wist@my-place.social · Apr 7

Apr 7

WIST Quotations @wist@my-place.social

A quotation from Chamfort

He who tries to make his happiness depend too much on his reason, who holds it up for examination, who quibbles, as it were, with his delights, and admits no indelicate pleasures, ends by having none at all. He is a man who cards the wool of his mattress until nothing is left, and he ends by sleeping on the boards.

[Celui qui veut trop faire dépendre son bonheur de sa raison, qui le soumet à l’examen, qui chicane, pour ainsi dire, ses jouissances, et n’admet que des plaisirs délicats, finit par n’en plus avoir. C’est un homme qui, à force de faire carder son matelas, le voit diminuer, et finit par coucher sur la dure.]

Nicolas Chamfort (1741-1794) French writer, epigrammist (b. Nicolas-Sébastien Roch)
Products of Perfected Civilization [Produits de la Civilisation Perfectionée], Part 1 “Maxims and Thoughts [Maximes et Pensées],” ch. 2, ¶ 179 (1795) [tr. Merwin (1969)]

Sourcing, notes, alternate translations: wist.info/chamfort-nicolas/760…

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**JustAnotherGail** @JustAnotherGail@chattrbx.com · Apr 7

Apr 7

JustAnotherGail @JustAnotherGail@chattrbx.com

A good game (or thirty) of pinball gives me a huge amount of #pleasure, especially since we have a pinball museum right in town.

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**Wisdom in Space** @wisdom@c.im · Apr 5

Apr 5

Wisdom in Space @wisdom@c.im

If you always do what interests you, at least one person is pleased.
-- Katharine Hepburn

#Wisdom #Quotes #KatharineHepburn #Pleasure

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**WIST Quotations** @wist@my-place.social · Apr 2

Apr 2

WIST Quotations @wist@my-place.social

A quotation from Ella Wheeler Wilcox

“He is mad as a hare, poor fellow,
   And should be in chains” you say,
I haven’t a doubt of your statement,
   But who isn’t mad, I pray?
Why, the world is a great asylum,
   And the people are all insane,
Gone daft with pleasure or folly,
   Or crazed with passion and pain.

Ella Wheeler Wilcox (1850-1919) American author, poet, temperance advocate, spiritualist
Poem (1876), “All Mad,” st. 1, Maurine and Other Poems

Sourcing, notes: wist.info/wilcox-ella-wheeler/…

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**WIST Quotations** @wist@my-place.social · Apr 2

Apr 2

WIST Quotations @wist@my-place.social

A quotation from Bertrand Russell

A man may feel so completely thwarted that he seeks no form of satisfaction, but only distraction and oblivion. He then becomes a devotee of “pleasure.” That is to say, he seeks to make life bearable by becoming less alive. Drunkenness, for example, is temporary suicide: the happiness that it brings is merely negative, a momentary cessation of unhappiness.

Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) English mathematician and philosopher
Conquest of Happiness, Part 1, ch. 1 “What Makes People Unhappy?” (1930)

Sourcing, notes: wist.info/russell-bertrand/760…

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