(August 11, 2015 at 5:32 am)ignoramus Wrote: ...
Nothing really good or really bad lasts a long time.
...
I disagree with that saying. David Hume expressed it well, so I will simply quote him:
Quote:Admitting your position, replied PHILO, which yet is extremely doubtful, you must at the same time allow, that if pain be less frequent than pleasure, it is infinitely more violent and durable. One hour of it is often able to outweigh a day, a week, a month of our common insipid enjoyments; and how many days, weeks, and months, are passed by several in the most acute torments? Pleasure, scarcely in one instance, is ever able to reach ecstasy and rapture; and in no one instance can it continue for any time at its highest pitch and altitude. The spirits evaporate, the nerves relax, the fabric is disordered, and the enjoyment quickly degenerates into fatigue and uneasiness. But pain often, good God, how often! rises to torture and agony; and the longer it continues, it becomes still more genuine agony and torture. Patience is exhausted, courage languishes, melancholy seizes us, and nothing terminates our misery but the removal of its cause, or another event, which is the sole cure of all evil, but which, from our natural folly, we regard with still greater horror and consternation.
Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Part 10, David Hume.
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/4583/4583-h/4583-h.htm
Humans, and animals generally, are much more capable of experiencing pain than pleasure. You cannot have a continuous orgasm, but you can be in continuous agony.
"A wise man ... proportions his belief to the evidence."
— David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Section X, Part I.
