Word Finder - pleasures

definition

A state of being pleased or contented; gratification.

example

He remembered with pleasure his home and family.

synonyms

• delight
• gladness
• gratification
• happiness
• indulgence
• satisfaction

definition

A person, thing or action that causes enjoyment.

example

Having a good night's sleep is one of life's little pleasures.

synonyms

• delight
• joy

definition

One's preference.

example

What is your pleasure: coffee or tea?

synonyms

• desire
• fancy
• want
• will
• wish

definition

The will or desire of someone or some agency in power.

example

at Congress's pleasure: whenever or as long as Congress desires

synonyms

• discretion

definition

To give or afford pleasure to.

synonyms

• gratify
• please

definition

To give sexual pleasure to.

example

Johnny pleasured Jackie orally last night.

definition

To take pleasure; to seek or pursue pleasure.

example

to go pleasuring

I want to entertain him as far as I can, with all the pleasures of life here.

Benjamin's tastes had at first been for the sea rather than the pulpit; now they inclined rather to intellectual than to other pleasures.

Its origin is the thirst for being which leads from birth to birth, together with lust and desire, which find gratification here and there; the thirst for pleasures, for being, for power.

He puts far greater stress than his predecessors upon the sympathetic pleasures, and thus quite avoids that appearance of mean prudential selfishness that is such a depressing feature in Paley and Bentham.

The keynote of this tendency had been struck by Hobbes, in whose philosophy man was regarded as a mere selfish sensitive machine, moved solely by pleasures and pains.

In this the burlesque exaggeration of the pleasures of eating and drinking, which is one of the chief exterior notes of the whole work, is pushed to an extreme - an extreme which has attracted natural but perhaps undue attention.

And, the question being put in this form, the attempt has been made in some cases to explain away any peculiarity in the emotions by analysing them into simpler elements, such as primitive organic pleasures and prolonged associations of usefulness or fitness.

She thus bids adieu to all her friends, and having previously taken the white veil, the betrothal, she now assumes the black, and for ever forswears the world and its pleasures.

Unusual bodily vigour enabled him to combine severe devotion to work with facile indulgence in sensual pleasures.

The pleasures of a roving life, enlivened by occasional skirmishes with forces organized and led by Spanish officials, gained upon them.

Mill recognizes an ultimate difference in quality between higher and lower pleasures.

He censures his brother, Timocrates, who, though professedly Epicurean, maintained the existence of pleasures other than those of the body.

A wealthy man, addicted to his pleasures and his profits, finds religion to be a traffic so entangled, and of so many piddling accounts, that of all mysteries he cannot skill to keep a stock going upon that trade.

The main objections to this are that it does not explain the infinite variety of phenomena, and that it disregards the distinction which most philosophers admit between higher and lower pleasures.

The noise of the ship's guns, as the company sails off, wakes the poet to the real pleasures of a May morning.

Finding that his brother had procured his election for the county of Kildare, and desiring to maintain political independence, Lord Edward refused the command of an expedition against Cadiz offered him by Pitt, and devoted himself for the next few years to the pleasures of society and his parliamentary duties.

Gentz, who from the winter of 1806 onwards divided his time between Prague and the Bohemian wateringplaces, seemed to devote himself wholly to the pleasures of society, his fascinating personality gaining him a ready reception in those exalted circles which were to prove of use to him later on in Vienna.

Greek philosophy, and the interpretation of the Koran; that he was much addicted to worldly pleasures, especially to excessive wine drinking.

Thus they were divided in soul between spiritual goods and worldly pleasures, and were apt to doubt whether the rewards promised by God to the life of " simplicity " (all Christ meant by the childlike spirit, including generosity in giving and forgiving) and self-restraint, were real or not.

Lucretius Carus (96-55) were entire seclusion from public life and absorption in the ideal pleasures of contemplation and artistic production.

He has the interest of being the last poet of the free republic. In his life and in his art he was the precursor of those poets who used their genius as the interpreter and minister of pleasure; but he rises above them in the spirit of personal independence, in his affection for his friends, in his keen enjoyment of natural and simple pleasures, and in his power of giving vital expression to these feelings.

It became also the organ of the pleasures and interests of private life, the chief motives of which were the love of nature and the passion of love.

All his time was spent in the pleasures of his harem, the intrigues of which were further complicated by his falling in love with and marrying his own daughter Atossa (according to the Persian religion a marriage between the nearest relations is no incest).

Probably he lost nothing of his popularity with the army by occasional indulgence in sensual pleasures.

He held that the people, as distinguished from the nobles and the clergy, were the pith and fibre of nations; yet this same people had to become wax in the hands of the politician - their commerce and their comforts, the arts which give a dignity to life and the pleasures which make life liveable, neglected - their very liberty subordinated to the one tyrannical conception.

As the earlier Renaissance had specially occupied itself with the practical business and pleasures of life, so the later Renaissance specially mused on the vanity of this business and these pleasures.

The " zodiac of labours " was replaced in French castles and hotels by a " zodiac of pleasures," in which hunting, hawking, fishing and dancing were substituted for hoeing, planting, reaping and ploughing.8 It is curious to find the same sequence of symbols employed for the same decorative purposes in India as in Europe.

Christ was soon to return, and the employments and labours and pleasures of this age were of small concern.

It follows (1) that past and future pleasure have no real existence for us, and (2) that among present pleasures there is no distinction of kind, but only of intensity.

Socrates had spoken of the higher pleasures of the intellect; the Cyrenaics denied the validity of this distinction and said that bodily pleasures as being more simple and more intense are to be preferred.

On the other hand attempts have been made to separate hedonism, as the search for a continuous series of physical pleasures, from eudaemonism, a condition of enduring mental satisfaction.

Such a distinction involves the assumptions that bodily pleasures are generically different from mental ones, and that there is in practice a clearly marked dividing line, - both of which hypotheses are frequently denied.

The ordinary pleasures of festivals were mingled with all this, such as dances in beast-masks, sham fights and children's games, but the type of a religious function was a sickening butchery followed by a cannibal feast.

Attached to the household of Gaston, duke of Orleans, brother of Louis XIII., he gained a complete ascendancy over the weak prince by pandering to his pleasures, and became his adviser in the intrigues against Cardinal Richelieu.

It should be observed, however, that this choice of pleasures by a hedonist is conditioned not by "moral" (absolute) but by prudential (relative) considerations.

Self-control in the choice of pleasures with a view to reducing pain to a minimum is indispensable.

The ethics of these principles were worked out in Discours sur le bonheur, La Volupte, and L' Art de jouir, in which the end of life is found in the pleasures of the senses, and virtue is reduced to self-love.

His lectures were published at intervals from 1870 to 1885 in Aratra Pentelici, The Eagle's Nest, Love's Heinle, Ariadne Florentina, Val d'Arno, Proserpina, Deucalion, The Laws of Fesole, The Bible of Amiens, The Art of England and The Pleasures of England, together with a series of pamphlets, letters, articles, notes, catalogues and circulars.

Having weighed the probable pains and pleasures of approaching old age, he decided that life had nothing left for which he greatly cared, and drowned himself.

Life is sweet, and most men have more pleasures than pains in their lives.

For some time after the marriage, the young couple were controlled by the empress Elizabeth, who appointed court officials to keep a watch on their conduct; but before long these custodians themselves had become the agents of Catherine's pleasures and ambition.

The reason or intellect is introduced to balance possible pleasures and pains, and to construct a scheme in which pleasures are the materials of a happy life.

Feeling, which Epicurus declared to be the means of determining what is good, is subordinated to a reason which adjudicates between competing pleasures with the view of securing tranquillity of mind and body.

Bodily pleasures and all sensuous impulses must be abandoned as detrimental to the spiritual purity of the soul.

Shooting and music were his only pleasures, and he was the generous patron of the famous singer Farinelli, whose voice soothed his melancholy.

These elements are, briefly stated, (1) a strong partiality for subjects dealing with humble life, in country and town, with the fun of taverns and village greens, with that domestic life in the rough which goes to the making of the earlier farces in English and French; (2) a whimsical, elfin kind of wit, delighting in extravagance and topsy-turviness; (3) a frank interest in the pleasures of good company and good drink.

During the first few months in Weimar the poet gave himself up to the pleasures of the moment as unreservedly as his patron; indeed, the Weimar court even looked upon him for a time as a tempter who led the young duke astray.

Augustus in 22 placed the direction of all the popular festivals in the hands of the praetors, and it is not without significance that the praetors continued thus to minister to the pleasures of the Roman mob for centuries after they had ceased almost entirely to transact the business of the state.

Now, in cases of danger being threatened to their own ascendancy by such practices, the gods as a rule proceed to employ the usually successful expedient of despatching some lovely nymph to lure the saintly men back to worldly pleasures.

For, if the human soul is identical with God, the practice of austerities must be discarded as directed against God, and it is rather by a free indulgence of the natural appetites and the pleasures of life that man's love for God will best be shown.