Take from the philosopher the pleasure of being heard and his desire for knowledge ceases.

There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge.

My birth neither shook the German Empire nor caused much of an upheaval in the home. It pleased mother caused father a certain amount of pride and my elder brother the usual fraternal jealousy of a hitherto only son.

Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred jealousy boastfulness disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence. In other words it is war minus the shooting.

The ability to take pleasure in one's life is a skill and is a kind of intelligence. So intelligence is a hard thing to evaluate and it manifests itself in so many different ways. I do think the ability to know how to live a life and not be miserable is a sign of that.

Fantasies are more than substitutes for unpleasant reality they are also dress rehearsals plans. All acts performed in the world begin in the imagination.

How can a doctor judge a woman's sanity by merely bidding her good morning and refusing to hear her pleas for release? Even the sick ones know it is useless to say anything for the answer will be that it is their imagination.

The pleasures of the imagination are as it were only drawings and models which are played with by poor people who cannot afford the real thing.

The imagination is the spur of delights... all depends upon it it is the mainspring of everything now is it not by means of the imagination one knows joy? Is it not of the imagination that the sharpest pleasures arise?

Everything that is new or uncommon raises a pleasure in the imagination because it fills the soul with an agreeable surprise gratifies its curiosity and gives it an idea of which it was not before possessed.

I think that different pleasures work for different readers - a friend of mine won't read anything that's not a cardiovascular sort of page-turner. I tend to care less about plot but I'm a sucker for humor and strangeness.

It is in vain to hope to please all alike. Let a man stand with his face in what direction he will he must necessarily turn his back on one half of the world.

Before I do a play I say that I hope it's going to be for as short a time as possible but once you do it it is a paradoxical pleasure. One evening out of two there are five minutes of a miracle and for those five minutes you want to do it again and again. It's like a drug.

It has never been and never will be easy work! But the road that is built in hope is more pleasant to the traveler than the road built in despair even though they both lead to the same destination.

The care of the Earth is our most ancient and most worthy and after all our most pleasing responsibility. To cherish what remains of it and to foster its renewal is our only hope.

I hope that what you take away from my album is not just the music - which I did want to be fun and I did want it to be about individuality but please also take away from it that there's no dream that's too big.

The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure but from hope to hope.

I hope that posterity will judge me kindly not only as to the things which I have explained but also to those which I have intentionally omitted so as to leave to others the pleasure of discovery.

My theory has always been that if we are to dream the flatteries of hope are as cheap and pleasanter than the gloom of despair.

So I got home and the phone was ringing. I picked it up and said 'Who's speaking please?' And a voice said 'You are.'

My biggest nightmare is I'm driving home and get sick and go to hospital. I say: 'Please help me.' And the people say: 'Hey you look like...' And I'm dying while they're wondering whether I'm Barbra Streisand.

Bad psychoanalysis would say I enjoyed pleasing people working really hard and pleasing people which is probably related to my father in some way. But I really liked working hard. When I worked at Disneyland I'd do 12 hours straight and go home thrilled.

If my world were to cave in tomorrow I would look back on all the pleasures excitements and worthwhilenesses I have been lucky enough to have had. Not the sadness not my miscarriages or my father leaving home but the joy of everything else. It will have been enough.

Happy happy Christmas that can win us back to the delusions of our childhood days recall to the old man the pleasures of his youth and transport the traveler back to his own fireside and quiet home!