"The Art of Life Lies in Taking Pleasures as They Pass"

"The art of life lies in taking pleasures as they pass,
and the keenest pleasures are not intellectual, nor are they always moral."
(Aristippus)
Aristippus was a follower of Socrates, and the founder of the Cyrenaic school of philosophy. He taught that the ultimate goal of all our actions is pleasure, and that we should not defer pleasures that are ready at hand for the sake of future pleasures. He was willing to break the social conventions of his day and engage in behavior that was considered undignified or shocking for the sake of obtaining pleasurable experiences. The Cyrenaic school developed these ideas further and influenced Epicurus and the later Greek skeptics.
Like other Greek ethical thinkers, Aristippus' ethics are centered around the question of what the 'end' is; i.e., what goal our actions aim at and what is valuable for its own sake. Aristippus identified the end as pleasure. This identification of pleasure as the end makes Aristippus a hedonist. Most of the pleasures that Aristippus is depicted as pursuing have to do with sensual gratification, such as sleeping with courtesans and enjoying fine food and old wines.
Xenophon, a hostile contemporary of Aristippus', reports that Aristippus rejected delaying any gratification. Aristippus advocated simply deriving pleasure from whatever is present, and not producing trouble for oneself by toiling to obtain things which may bring one pleasure in the future.
In his pursuit of sensual gratification, Aristippus showed little regard for the standards of propriety reigning in Greece at the time. Although many of the sensationalistic stories about Aristippus are probably false, they depict a man who is willing to engage in activity that is shocking, undignified, and callous for the sake of his own pleasure, and who displays disdain for conventional standards as being mere societal prejudices.
Such a life would be branded by most Greeks as being enslaved to pleasure. Aristippus, however, thought that his willingness to do anything whatsoever for the sake of pleasure, his total flexibility, brought him a kind of freedom. Aristippus was able to do whatever the circumstances demanded of him, and his single-mindedness and disregard of social conventions made him master of himself. Aristippus said that he possessed the courtesan Laïs, but was not possessed by her, and that "what is best is not abstaining from pleasures, but instead controlling them without being controlled." That is, as long as you are clear-headed and single-minded in your pursuit of pleasure, it is not as though pursuing pleasure in this way is making you do anything unwillingly, or making you lose your self-control.

(Intenet Encyopedia of Philosophy)