Pleasure, delight, voluptuousness. The idea of pleasure is of a positive experience vastly more broad than delight or voluptuousness , since this word is related to a greater number of experiences than these other terms. It involves the mind, the heart, the senses, and good fortune, in sum, all that is capable of giving us pleasure . The idea of delight goes beyond that of pleasure in respect to the intensity of feeling, but its aim is far more circumscribed. It is limited to the power of sense and is principally concerned with achieving the highest sensual levels. The idea of voluptuousness is completely sensual, and seems to reveal in its makeup a delicate something which refines and enhances the taste.

True philosophers look for pleasure in all that they do and make doing their duty a pleasure. It is a delight for some to drink ice in their water, even in winter; for others ice is a matter of indifference, even in summer. Women typically push their sensuality up to the point of voluptuousness. However, this level of feeling lasts but a moment. For them things are as rapid as they are ravishing.

All that one can say about these words applies only in the sense where they identify a feeling or a happy disposition of the soul. Yet they also have, in the plural, another meaning whereby they express the reason or cause of the feeling, as when one says of a person that he gives himself entirely over to pleasures : that he revels in the delights of the country, that he immerses himself in those things that create a feeling of voluptuousness . Taken in this latter sense, as in the former, these words have their differences and their special connotations. The word pleasure has a greater relation to personal practices, to ways of doing things and pastimes, such as eating, gaming, theatre going, and the play of manners. The practices that cause delight have in addition elements of appeal that stem from nature, the arts, and easy living as, for example, lovely homes, rare possessions, and select company. The practices that create a feeling of voluptuousness have in common the notion of excess leading to softness of character, debauchery, and licentiousness; those practices sought out by outrageous taste, seasoned by excessive leisure, and bought at a price. Such were said to be like those to which Tiberius abandoned himself on the isle of Capri and those of the Sybarites in the palace they built along the river Crathes, Girard .