(There’s only one beautiful baby in the world and each mother has it.)

PLEASURE

EPICURE, n. An opponent of Epicurus, an abstemious philosopher who, holding that pleasure should be the chief aim of man, wasted no time in gratification from the senses. – Ambrose Bierce, Devil’s Dictionary

VALUES and VALUE JUDGEMENTS

Value, far from being contrasted with fact and logic as swamp with firm ground…is more fundamental than either…Neither logic nor history nor physics nor philosophy nor any other sphere in which this is preferred to that, where one view may and must be compared in soundness with another, where reasons may be adjudged good or bad, strong or weak, can be a vantage from which a philosopher may look down on the concept of value, unless we talk of looking down to mark the necessary but rare recognition that here if anywhere is the bedrock in search of which so many philosophers have scanned the sky. – JR Bambrough, Moral Scepticism and Moral Knowledge, p106

What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. – Wilde, Lady Windemere’s Fan, Lord Darlington, Act III

Whatever has various respects, must have various appearances of good and evil, beauty or deformity: thus, the gardener tears up as a weed, the plant which the physician gathers as a medicine; and “a general…will look with pleasure over a plain, as a fit place on which the fate of empires might be decided in battle; which the farmer will despise as bleak and barren, neither fruitful of pasturage, nor fit for tillage.”
+++++Two men examining the same question, proceed commonly like the physician and gardener in selecting herbs, or the farmer and hero looking on the plain; they bring minds impressed with different notions, and direct their inquiries to different ends; they form, therefore, contrary conclusions, and each wonders at the other’s absurdity. – Johnson, Adventurer, No. 107