There are many different kinds of pleasurable experiences, each yielding its own kind of satisfaction. In the state of future perfection, there will be pleasure without danger and security without restraint. However, we cannot avoid, in some quasi-metaphorical sense, weighing pleasures against each other. The love of pleasure and the fear of pain are the ruling principles of the human heart, in which they maintain an uninterrupted struggle for superiority. Still, it is clear that there are no real units of pleasure and that reference to them is merely a convenient device for making our calculations as accurate as the nature of the case allows. The calculations for units of pleasure are themselves are indispensable. For example, when fines are imposed in the courts, some alternative punishment must be found for those who cannot, or will not, pay the fine. Clearly, we cannot strictly say that the pain of losing five pounds is precisely equivalent to the pain endured during seven days in prison. Yet it is necessary to find some such equivalent, and the job of finding equivalents can be better or worse done.  

Pleasure and pain are the night and day of life, and succeed one another as duly. As many know what an exquisite delight there is in conveying pleasure to a beloved object, so some few may have experienced the satisfaction of tormenting one we hate. Flatter not yourself with contrarieties of pleasure. Of the blessing set before you, make your choice, and be content. So understood, the weighing of pleasures and pains against each other is not at all absurd. That the process is not mathematically exact can hardly count against it as an analysis of moral evaluation, since moral evaluation is not mathematically exact either. The pleasure which attends noble aims remunerates not the pains they bring with them. Lower pleasures may sometimes please us more than higher pleasures; but even then, higher pleasures are to be preferred. Pleasure is the sole good will seem to collapse, since the higher pleasures apparently have an element of value, other than the mere quantity of pleasure, that the lower pleasure lacks.   

Higher pleasure may be better, even though less pleasant, than the lower pleasure. It is true that the lower pleasure may be more intense; but more is involved in quantity of pleasure than just intensity. To make life pleasant, we must have our trifling amusements as well as our sublime transports. More is involved in quantity of pleasure than just intensity. There are other distinguished dimensions of pleasure: apart from intensity, these are duration, certainty, propinquity, fecundity, and purity. Now it is arguable that the so-called higher pleasures are just those that afford a more lasting satisfaction than the lower pleasures (duration), that enlarge our horizons and so open up new possibilities of pleasure (fecundity), and that are less likely to be followed eventually by the pain of satiety and boredom (purity). These are the characteristics that distinguish intellectual activity, for example, from purely physical pleasure. Get a new perspective. You are full of extraordinary abilities and power. The greatest force in the Universe is in you. The same power that raised Christ from the dead lives on inside of you.  

There is no challenge too tough for you, no enemy too big, no aliment too great, and no dream that you cannot accomplish. All of our difficulties are only platforms for the manifestations of God’s grace, power, and love. If anyone would tell you the shortest, surest way to happiness, one must tell you to make it a rule to thank and praise God for everything that happens to you. For it is certain that whatever seeming calamity happens to you, if you thank and praise God for it, you turn it into a blessing. God is greater than anything against you, and God controls your destiny. No weapon formed against you will prosper. I believe that is it just a matter of time before something extraordinary happens in your life. The higher levels of pleasure, it may be argued, are those which people have found, through long experience, to be productive of most pleasure when all these factors are taken into account. You may have a reason to feel sorry for yourself, but you do not have a right. God promised to turn your pain and suffering into pleasure and success.  

God said He will pay you back double for the wrongs done to you, but you have to do part yourself. If you are to see the beauty, is you are to get double, you have to shake off the discouragement and get back to living life. We all have wounds, hurt feelings, and sad stories, but we cannot let a loss, a health issues, or a divorce be the excuse to sit on the sidelines. Sometimes in life we have to work through the pain. God rewards faithful people. People who are determined. People who get knocked down, but do not stay down. Instead, they get back up again. If at first you do not succeed, dust yourself off and trying again. Try again. You do not have to throw it all away. You cannot let the hurt, the pain, or the bad break cause you to be bitter, or to lose your passion, or to start blaming God. Perhaps the crucial question for utilitarian ethic intended mainly for lawyers and legislators is whether it can account adequately for justice. It may be argued that justice required the equalization as well as the maximization of pleasure.  

It is not unjust to require me to endure five units of pain on Monday for the sake of ten units of pleasure on Tuesday. The maximization of pleasure will itself involve an equalizing tendency. This is because the economist’s law of diminishing utility applies to pleasure. The minor amenities of life afford much pleasure to someone whose other pleasures are few, but comparatively little to someone whose pleasures are many. Consequently, while it is true that a utilitarian, forced to choose between a course of action that gives X and Y 10 units of pleasure each and one that gives X 31 units of pleasure and Y 10 units of pain, will prefer the second, it is also true that such choices are most likely to arise when X’s life is as general rule more painful than Y’s. God will not permit any trouble to come upon us, unless He has a specific plan by which great blessing can come out of the difficulty. Father, You have promised to take the scars of my life and turn them into stars, to give be beauty for pain, and to pay me back double for anything I lost.   

I have made up my mind to endure, knowing You restore health and give new opportunities and new relationships and new perspectives. Even though it is a painful time, it is not the end. I am still learning about life. A full life is still in front of me. I believe You have an “after this” in my future. God is going to make the rest of our lives the best of our lives. Our conviction that it is unjust to punish an innocent man is based on nothing but the empirical consideration that punishing the innocent is not likely to deter others from crime. This is, however, not always true: the innocent person may be a hostage, or one may be generally thought to be guilty. There is a distinguished difference between first-order evil, or pain caused to assignable individuals, and second-order evil, or pain caused to the community in general. Insecurity is a very great second-order evil. The point is a general one of central importance. We need to invoke a distinction between first order and second-order evil in order to explain the common belief that general rules should be kept even in those cases where some slight increase in the general happiness might seem to result from breaking them.   

The slight increase in first-order good, it is argued, is outweighed by the second-order evil, which usually consist in the lessening of public confidence. (A large increase in the first-order good, it is conceded, may justify breaking the rule.) The argument is plausible, though of course there is no way of proving that the precise pint at which we feel justified in breaking the rule is the point at which the first-order good begins to outweigh the second-order evil. It is, however, open to the objection that, while it may be true as a matter of fact that punishing the innocent or breaking a promise will in general cause more pain than pleasure, most of us feel that these actions would be wrong even if this were not the case. The utilitarian can only reply that this is a mistake. Moral rules, one will say, embody human experience about what kinds of action make for the general happiness—human nature and the World in which we live both being what they are. If either were different, morality would be different; it is a mistake, though a natural one, to believe otherwise.  

If the central question of political philosophy is taken to be: “Why, if at all, should the citizen obey the state?” the utilitarian answers is quite clear. The citizen should obey just so far as obedience will contribute more to the general happiness than disobedience. If the central question is taken to be the nature and ontological status of the state, the answer is equally clear: the state is not a super-entity with purposes and a will of its own, but a human contrivance to enable humans to realize as many of their desires as possible. The general happiness, or the interest of the community in general, is always to be understood as the resultant of the hedonic calculus, the sum of pleasures and pains of individuals.  Consider this: The word weary means to lose the sense of pleasure, to not feel the enjoyment you once felt. Perhaps the battle you are facing has lasted longer than you thought it would. You have prayed. You have believed. You have done what you are supposed to, but there it is. How will you shake off the weariness and see God’s promise come to pass?   

Life is a hard fight, a struggle, a wrestling with the principle of evil….Every inch of the way must be disputed. The night is given us to take breath, to pray, to drink deep at the fountain of power. The day, to use the strength that have been given to us, to go forth to work with it till the evening. Right now the Creator of the Universe is breathing a second wind into you. Just receive it by faith. Power, might, energy, intensity, concentration, and vitality is coming into your mind, your body, and your soul. You will soar through life on wings like eagles. To be a poet is to have a soul so quick to discern that no shade of quality escapes it, and so quick to feel, that discernment is but a hand playing with finely-ordered variety on the chords of emotion—a soul in which knowledge passes instantaneously into feeling and feeling flashes back as a new organ of knowledge. One may have that condition by faith only. The one who is a hero can withstand unjust opinion. God has your best interest at heart–the treasure of Heaven, where all things that are divine belong.