Life's Pleasures Quote by Gilbert Highet

A neat little provocation dressed up as common sense, Highet’s line flatters the life of the mind while sneaking in a moral jab at everything else. The sentence builds like a sermon in miniature: pleasure, appetite, self-indulgence - all easy routes to self-destruction - then the punchline that thinking is uniquely harmless. It’s witty because it’s almost obviously false. People do worry themselves sick. People spiral. People talk themselves into catastrophes. Highet knows that; the overstatement is the mechanism.

The intent is less scientific than disciplinary. “Played,” “eaten,” and “drunk” are verbs of surrender, suggesting bodies commandeered by impulse. “Thought” is framed as the one activity that can’t kill you, which implicitly makes it the one activity you have no excuse to avoid. The subtext is Protestant in its work ethic but humanist in its chosen labor: if you’re going to overdo something, overdo reflection.

Context matters: Highet was a classicist and public intellectual in a mid-century world anxious about mass culture, distraction, and the idea that entertainment could become a full-time occupation. The line is a compact defense of reading, study, and sustained attention - not because they’re “good for you” in a wellness sense, but because they’re dignified, self-directed, and harder to commodify. The barb lands by reversing a modern fear: that thinking is dangerous. Highet suggests the danger is not thought, but the refusal to do it.