Humor can prove to be the conversational lubricant you need to remove the tension from the most unpleasant management- and accountability-related conversations.

My theory has always been, that if we are to dream, the flatteries of hope are as cheap, and pleasanter, than the gloom of despair.

It has never been, and never will be easy work! But the road that is built in hope is more pleasant to the traveler than the road built in despair, even though they both lead to the same destination.

Money can't buy you happiness but it does bring you a more pleasant form of misery.

Pleasant it is, when over a great sea the winds trouble the waters, to gaze from shore upon another's great tribulation; not because any man's troubles are a delectable joy, but because to perceive you are free of them yourself is pleasant.

I am convinced that material things can contribute a lot to making one's life pleasant, but, basically, if you do not have very good friends and relatives who matter to you, life will be really empty and sad and material things cease to be important.

I cannot think that when God sent us into the world, he had irreversibly decreed that we should be perpetually miserable in it. If our taking up the Cross imply our bidding adieu to all joy and satisfaction, how is it reconcilable with what Solomon expressly affirms of religion, that 'her ways are ways of pleasantness, and all her paths are peace?'

Say what you will about the ten commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them.

Truly, love is delightful and pleasant food, supplying, as it does, rest to the weary, strength to the weak, and joy to the sorrowful. It in fact renders the yoke of truth easy and its burden light.

It's difficult to think anything but pleasant thoughts while eating a homegrown tomato.

To have a great man for an intimate friend seems pleasant to those who have never tried it; those who have, fear it.

One of the pleasant duties of America's most famous announcers during the relatively short swing era of the big bands was to host late-night remotes from some of the most famous ballrooms throughout the country.

Divorce is never a pleasant experience. You look upon it as a failure. But I learned to be a different person once we broke up. Sometimes you learn more from failure than you do from success.

Nausea is a normal but unpleasant effect of pregnancy and a really good sign that it is going well. Women who experience nausea in early pregnancy are less likely to miscarry.

The dictum that truth always triumphs over persecution is one of the pleasant falsehoods which men repeat after one another till they pass into commonplaces, but which all experience refutes.

What's it like to envision the ten-thousand-year environmental impact of tossing a plastic bottle into the trash bin, all in the single second it takes to actually toss it? Or the ten-thousand-year history of the fossil fuel being burned to drive to work or iron a shirt? It may be environmentally progressive, but it's not altogether pleasant.

I find the parallels between how some investors refuse to recognise the trends and our reaction to some of our environmental challenges very powerful. There is an unwillingness to process unpleasant data.

The primary purpose of a liberal education is to make one's mind a pleasant place in which to spend one's leisure.

All of us have been trained by education and environment to seek personal gain and security and to fight for ourselves. Though we cover it over with pleasant phrases, we have been educated for various professions within a system which is based on exploitation and acquisitive fear.

A test of what is real is that it is hard and rough. Joys are found in it, not pleasure. What is pleasant belongs to dreams.

The first couple of days on the detox diet aren't pleasant.

Color does not add a pleasant quality to design - it reinforces it.

I think feminism's a bit misinterpreted. It was about casting off all gender roles. There's nothing wrong with a man holding a door open for a girl. But we sort of threw away all the rules, so everybody's confused. And dating becomes a sloppy, uncomfortable, unpleasant thing.

Computers can be taught that certain tune or certain chords changes will sound pleasant together, but I don't think it's going to reach a point where a machine will generate ideas and styles.