Pity melts the mind to love.—­Dryden.

Pleasure.—­Would you judge of the lawfulness or unlawfulness of pleasures, take this rule:—­Whatever weakens your reason, impairs the tenderness of your conscience, obscures your sense of God, or takes off the relish of spiritual things; in short, whatever increases the strength and authority of your body over your mind, that thing is sin to you, however innocent it may be in itself.—­Southey.

Let not the enjoyment of pleasures now within your grasp be carried to such excess as to incapacitate you from future repetition.—­Seneca.

The inward pleasure of imparting pleasure—­that is the choicest of all.—­Hawthorne.

He who can at all times sacrifice pleasure to duty approaches sublimity.—­Lavater.

The end of pleasure is to support the offices of life, to relieve the fatigues of business, to reward a regular action, and to encourage the continuance.—­Jeremy Collier.

Choose such pleasures as recreate much and cost little.—­Fuller.

The pleasures of the world are deceitful; they promise more than they give.  They trouble us in seeking them, they do not satisfy us when possessing them, and they make us despair in losing them.—­Madame de Lambert.

When the idea of any pleasure strikes your imagination, make a just computation between the duration of the pleasure and that of the repentance that is likely to follow it.—­Epictetus.

The seeds of repentance are sown in youth by pleasure, but the harvest is reaped in age by pain.—­Colton.

Pleasure’s the only noble end
To which all human powers should tend;
And virtue gives her heavenly lore,
But to make pleasure please us more! 
Wisdom and she were both design’d
To make the senses more refined,
That man might revel free from cloying,
Then most a sage, when most enjoying! 

          
                          —­Moore.

Pleasure, or wrong or rightly understood,
Our greatest evil, or our greatest good. 
—­Pope.

People should be guarded against temptation to unlawful pleasures by furnishing them the means of innocent ones.  In every community there must be pleasures, relaxations, and means of agreeable excitement; and if innocent are not furnished, resort will be had to criminal.  Man was made to enjoy as well as labor, and the state of society should be adapted to this principle of human nature.—­Channing.

Mental pleasures never cloy; unlike those of the body, they are increased by repetition, approved of by reflection, and strengthened by enjoyment.—­Colton.

I should rejoice if my pleasures were as pleasing to God as they are to myself.—­Marguerite de Valois.

We tire of those pleasures we take, but never of those we give.  —­J.  Petit-Senn.