I really do feel like an unremarkable person trying really hard, openly, to do something interesting and to make something of value and pleasure.
What we are only now beginning to fully realize is that in seeking material pleasure too constantly, the capacity for enjoyment or fulfillment decreases and eventually becomes exhausted.
Sorry, but there is no pleasure in finding new ways of saying the same stuff about projects which tanked.
I'm fascinated with design. I realized early that I had no talent in that direction, but I love talking with architects and designers about what they do. I appreciate applied creativity as a source of pleasure and meaning.
I don't gamble, because winning a hundred dollars doesn't give me great pleasure. But losing a hundred dollars pisses me off.
In life there is nothing more unexpected and surprising than the arrivals and departures of pleasure. If we find it in one place today, it is vain to seek it there tomorrow. You can not lay a trap for it.
You have to find some way of engaging with the world around you, however it's constituted. The engagement is necessarily going to be flawed. But if you do it on your own terms, you'll be able to extract some pleasure from the world. It might even make you really happy sometimes.
Pleasure reading has long been an American ideal - generations of schoolchildren have headed home for the summer toting recreational reading lists. But try to pitch it to a group of non-readers, and they quickly become suspicious.
We can finish a house, but never a home. Once you fall in love with a house, you find continual pleasures in fixing it up and making innovations that satisfy your creature's comforts.
No state of society or laws can render men so much alike but that education, fortune, and tastes will interpose some differences between them; and though different men may sometimes find it their interest to combine for the same purposes, they will never make it their pleasure.
