Life & Wisdom Quote by Edward Young

Young’s line snaps shut like a moral trap: the man chasing pleasure isn’t merely at risk of pain, he is already constituted by it. The phrasing is deliberately symmetrical, almost legalistic, turning “pleasure” into a liability that automatically accrues “pains.” It’s not a warning from the sidelines; it’s a redefinition. To be “of” pleasure is to belong to a regime of appetite, and appetite, in Young’s worldview, is a creditor that always collects.

The intent is rooted in the 18th-century moral imagination, where indulgence wasn’t framed as self-care or liberation but as spiritual mismanagement. Young, best known for Night Thoughts, wrote in a culture primed by Protestant seriousness and early-modern anxieties about vice: hangovers of the body, hangovers of the soul. Pleasure here isn’t art, companionship, or joy; it’s sensation pursued as an end, a treadmill that requires escalation. The subtext is psychological before it’s theological: constant pleasure-seeking produces dependence, boredom, and the thin panic of needing the next hit of novelty. Pain isn’t the punishment after the party; it’s the cost of living in a state where satisfaction can’t last.

What makes the epigram work is its compressed cynicism. Young doesn’t argue. He collapses the supposed opposite terms into the same identity, implying that hedonism is a kind of self-harm dressed up as freedom. In an era that often markets pleasure as painless, the line still lands because it names the modern hangover: not just regret, but depletion.