"If pleasure was not followed by pain, who would forbear it?"
About this Quote
Johnson compresses a psychology of self-restraint into a single, pointed question. Pleasure exerts an immediate pull. If it were not yoked to later costs, almost no one would resist. Forbearance here means the difficult act of abstaining when desire urges otherwise. What keeps us from constant indulgence is not a waning of pleasure’s appeal but the anticipated hangover, the debt that follows extravagance, the dulled mind after dissipation, the moral wound that trails a lie. Pain, remembered or foreseen, becomes the governor on appetite.
The thought sits squarely in Johnson’s moral universe, shaped by Christian belief, 18th-century conduct literature, and his own acquaintance with bodily pain and melancholy. He distrusted easy hedonism not because pleasure is evil but because it is slippery. A world in which pleasure never bites back would be a world without prudence or temperance. Virtue would wither because it gains much of its meaning from choosing a good that is not immediately pleasant and avoiding a sweet that carries poison. Johnson often treats this tie between consequence and character as a providential arrangement: we are taught by experience to prefer durable goods over flashes of delight.
There is an Epicurean echo too, though Johnson stands apart from classical hedonism. Even Epicurus counseled choosing pleasures with an eye to their aftereffects. Johnson sharpens the point. He implies that fear of pain is the first schoolmaster of wisdom. Only later, perhaps, do we learn to love moderation for its own sake.
Not every pleasure ends in pain, and Johnson would not deny the harmless joys of friendship, conversation, or music. Yet the possibility of pain is enough to sober desire, to make imagination run ahead to the bill that will come due. The line endures because it clarifies a basic human calculus: costs tether cravings. Freedom, rightly used, looks beyond the moment and forgoes what cannot be kept without injury.
The thought sits squarely in Johnson’s moral universe, shaped by Christian belief, 18th-century conduct literature, and his own acquaintance with bodily pain and melancholy. He distrusted easy hedonism not because pleasure is evil but because it is slippery. A world in which pleasure never bites back would be a world without prudence or temperance. Virtue would wither because it gains much of its meaning from choosing a good that is not immediately pleasant and avoiding a sweet that carries poison. Johnson often treats this tie between consequence and character as a providential arrangement: we are taught by experience to prefer durable goods over flashes of delight.
There is an Epicurean echo too, though Johnson stands apart from classical hedonism. Even Epicurus counseled choosing pleasures with an eye to their aftereffects. Johnson sharpens the point. He implies that fear of pain is the first schoolmaster of wisdom. Only later, perhaps, do we learn to love moderation for its own sake.
Not every pleasure ends in pain, and Johnson would not deny the harmless joys of friendship, conversation, or music. Yet the possibility of pain is enough to sober desire, to make imagination run ahead to the bill that will come due. The line endures because it clarifies a basic human calculus: costs tether cravings. Freedom, rightly used, looks beyond the moment and forgoes what cannot be kept without injury.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
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