Interesting view on Pleasure from "Out of the Silent Planet"

"'Is the begetting of young not a pleasure among the hrossa?'

 'A very great on, Hman. This is what what we call love.'

 'If a thing is a pleasure, a hman wants it again. He might want the pleasure more often than the number of young that could be fed.'

 It took Hyoi a long time to get the point. 

 'You mean,' he said slowly, 'that he might do it not only in one or two years of his life but again?'

 'Yes.'

 'But why? Would he want his dinner all day or want to sleep after he had slept? I do not understand.'

 'But a dinner comes every day. This love, you say, comes only once while the hross lives?'

 'But it takes his whole life. When he is young he has to look for his mate; and then he has to court her; then he begets young; then he rears them; then he remembers all this, and boils it inside him and makes it into poems and wisdom.'

 'But the pleasure he must be content only to remember?'

 'That is like saying "My food I must be content to eat."'

 'I do not understand.'

 'A pleasure is full grown only when it is remembered. You are speaking, Hman, as if the pleasure were on thing and the memory another. It is all one thing. The seroni could say it better than I say it now. Not better than I could say it in a poem. What you call remembering is the last part of the pleasure, as the crah is the last part of a poem. When you and I met, the meeting was over very shortly, it was nothing. Now it is growing something as we remember it. But still we know very little about it. What it will be when I remember it as I lie down to die, what it makes in me all my days till then--that is the real meeting. The other is only the beginning of it. You say you have poets in your world. Do they not teach you this?'"

- C. S. Lewis

from: http://www.amazon.com/Out-Silent-Planet-Cosmic-Trilogy/dp/0007157150/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1348373529&sr=8-1&keywords=out+of+the+silent+planet

From "The Suicide of Thought"

"But what we suffer from today is humility in the wrong place. Modesty has moved from the organ of ambition. Modesty has settled upon the  organ of conviction; where it was never meant to be. A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed. Nowadays the part of a man that a man does assert is exactly the part he ought not to assert--himself. The part he doubts is exactly the part he ought not to doubt--the Divine Reason. Huxley preached a humility content to learn from Nature. But the new sceptic is so humble that he doubts if he can even learn. Thus we should be wrong if we had said hastily that there is no humility typical of our time. The truth is that there is a real humility typical of our time; but it so happens that it is practically a more poisonous humility than the wildest prostrations of the ascetic. The old humility was a spur that prevented a man from stopping ; not a nail in his boot that prevented him from going on. For the old humility made a man doubtful about his efforts, which might make him work harder. But new humility makes a man doubtful about his aims, which will make him stop working altogether. 

  At any street corner we may meet a man who utters the frantic and blasphemous statement that he may be wrong. Everyday one comes across somebody who says that of course his view may not be the right one. Of course his view must be the right one, or it is not his view. We are on the road to producing a race of men too mentally modest to believe in the multiplication table. We are in danger of seeing philosophers who doubt the law of gravity as being a mere fancy of their own. Scoffers of old time were too proud to be convinced; but these are too humble to be convinced. The meek do inherit the earth; but the modern sceptics are too meek to even claim their inheritance."

- G. K. Chesterton 

pgs 31-32

from: http://www.amazon.com/Orthodoxy-G-K-Chesterton/dp/1613822340/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1347556766&sr=8-2&keywords=orthodoxy