The Italians and Spanish, the Chinese and Vietnamese see food as part of a larger, more essential and pleasurable part of daily life. Not as an experience to be collected or bragged about – or as a ritual like filling up a car – but as something else that gives pleasure, like sex or music, or a good nap in the afternoon.

Do you know the only thing that gives me pleasure? It’s to see my dividends coming in.

To a man of pleasure every moment appears to be lost, which partakes not of the vivacity of amusement.

Anyone who’s a chef, who loves food, ultimately knows that all that matters is: ‚Is it good? Does it give pleasure?‘

A man’s delight in looking forward to and hoping for some particular satisfaction is a part of the pleasure flowing out of it, enjoyed in advance. But this is afterward deducted, for the more we look forward to anything the less we enjoy it when it comes.

Work is the meat of life, pleasure the dessert.

When people speak to you about a preventive war, you tell them to go and fight it. After my experience, I have come to hate war.

The questions which one asks oneself begin, at least, to illuminate the world, and become one’s key to the experience of others.

When a man says he had pleasure with a woman he does not mean conversation.

I had a C-section, and I found it fascinating. I didn’t find it a sacrifice, and I didn’t find it a painful experience. I found it a fascinating miracle of what a body can do.

When you’re older you want to learn from other people.

Any experience that touches you, in any particular way, is good. It can be a horrible experience.

I can think of nothing less pleasurable than a life devoted to pleasure.

Older and wiser voices can help you find the right path, if you are only willing to listen.

An identity would seem to be arrived at by the way in which the person faces and uses his experience.

Living is like tearing through a museum. Not until later do you really start absorbing what you saw, thinking about it, looking it up in a book, and remembering – because you can’t take it in all at once.

It put our energies to sleep and made visionaries of us – dreamers and indolent… It is good to begin life poor; it is good to begin life rich – these are wholesome; but to begin it prospectively rich! The man who has not experienced it cannot imagine the curse of it.

I seldom think of politics more than eighteen hours a day.

My role 14 years ago in Richard III – that was the first time I played a bad guy and learned a lot about it – they have all the fun!

When you have shot one bird flying you have shot all birds flying. They are all different and they fly in different ways but the sensation is the same and the last one is as good as the first.

Nothing would be more tiresome than eating and drinking if God had not made them a pleasure as well as a necessity.

I’ve actually taken companies public, I’ve actually busted companies, I’ve actually gone broke.

Nobody can write the life of a man but those who have eat and drunk and lived in social intercourse with him.

The only source of knowledge is experience.

When you have really exhausted an experience you always reverence and love it.

If in our daily life we can smile, if we can be peaceful and happy, not only we, but everyone will profit from it. This is the most basic kind of peace work.

Experience keeps a dear school, but fools will learn in no other.

The mind unlearns with difficulty what it has long learned.

Religion and ritual can be vehicles for entering stillness. It says in Psalm 46:10, ‚Be still, and know that I am God.‘ But they are still just vehicles. The Buddha called his teaching a raft: You don’t need to carry it around with you after you’ve crossed the river.

Context and memory play powerful roles in all the truly great meals in one’s life.

Part of every misery is, so to speak, the misery’s shadow or reflection: the fact that you don’t merely suffer but have to keep on thinking about the fact that you suffer. I not only live each endless day in grief, but live each day thinking about living each day in grief.

Many a man thinks he is buying pleasure, when he is really selling himself to it.

I’ve done auditions where the casting director is taking the paper out of my hand in the middle of reading.

The wise are instructed by reason, average minds by experience, the stupid by necessity and the brute by instinct.

I don’t concern myself with award. I’d been to the party enough times to know it really didn’t matter.

People are so caught in a routine, doing the same things over and over.

Getting in and out of the car with the halo takes a bit of experience. I struggled initially, but after a few trial runs I was fine.

The experience of pain or loss can be a formidably motivating force.

It is a clear gain to sacrifice pleasure in order to avoid pain.

I once did a three-hour interview with Radio Oxford only to be told the microphone hadn’t picked me up.

It always seems to me so odd that when a man dies, he takes out with him all the knowledge that he has got in his lifetime whilst sowing his wild oats or winning successes. And he leaves his sons or younger brothers to go through all the work of learning it over again from their own experience.

You don’t even really need a place. But you feel like you’re doing something. That is what coffee is. And that is one of the geniuses of the new coffee culture.

How we experience memory sometimes, it’s not linear. We’re not telling the stories to ourselves. We know the story; we’re just seeing it in flashes overlaid.

Self-complacency is pleasure accompanied by the idea of oneself as cause.

The problem is when that fun stuff becomes the habit. And I think that’s what’s happened in our culture. Fast food has become the everyday meal.

I want to – more than anything – to create a moment that people will never forget. Not for me, but for themselves. That’s what I remember about great Super Bowl performances in the past, when you really get lost in the moment with your family.

Every man is a damn fool for at least five minutes every day; wisdom consists in not exceeding the limit.

I have visited Japan several times and have always been shown wonderful hospitality.

There are definitely elements of experience and stuff that someone who’s my age wouldn’t have. But there are also things that I can do that other people wouldn’t necessarily be able to.

Buy the ticket, take the ride.

I wish I had known when I was in the White House what I know now about the Third World.

This has been my life for many years; one role feeds the other.

Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes.

Men who have reached and passed forty-five, have a look as if waiting for the secret of the other world, and as if they were perfectly sure of having found out the secret of this.

Most of the people that I deal with are human. So I’ve had a lot of experience with that.

When hiring somebody, I never ask to see a curriculum vitae. I feel that since I didn’t have one myself, it would be a bit presumptuous to ask to see anyone else’s.

Music was an experience, intimately married to your life. You could pay to hear music, but after you did, it was over, gone – a memory.

They’ve got this crazy actor who’s 82 years old up there in a suit. I was a mayor, and they’re probably thinking I know how to give a speech, but even when I was mayor I never gave speeches. I gave talks.

I feel like I just grabbed a big juicy worm with a right sharp hook in the middle of it.

Good judgment comes from experience, and a lot of that comes from bad judgment.

I sometimes wonder whether all pleasures are not substitutes for joy.