"mere pleasure" is a correct and usable phrase in written English.
It is often used to express something that is delightful, simple, or carefree. For example, "The sun's warmth on my face was a mere pleasure on that beautiful summer day."
Yet through words literature elevates and transforms experience beyond "mere" pleasure.
The three-day walk back down to Bolzano is mere pleasure by comparison, eating and drinking and laughing and arguing all the way down.
We get drunk, embark on non-procreative sex for mere pleasure, and may even sacrifice our lives for some perceived cause that has nothing to do with increasing our inclusive (genetic) fitness.
Rudel, tiring of mere pleasure, is told by a travelling Pilgrim — who, like Wagner's Brangäne, is less of an innocent bystander than she appears — of the Countess of Tripoli, a woman who is everything he desires.
Now too easily overlooked in the history of fantasy, MacDonald's stories ("At the Back of the North Wind," "The Princess and the Goblin," and, most of all, "Phantastes") evoked in Lewis an emotion bigger than mere pleasure — a kind of shining sense of goodness and romance and light.
In such parlous times, I felt a little guilty about indulging at length in reading for mere pleasure — the one lacuna in Merrill's cosmopolitanism was politics, which he seems to have found boring — but only a formidable pleasure was capable of drawing me away from the news, and for the sake of my mental health I decided I had to license it.
Lucas can therefore be enjoyed by radicals without any risk of being corrupted by mere aesthetic pleasure.
According to Badiou, "solving the existential problems of love is life's great joy," and our society has confused that joy, directed towards "the very being of the other" with a mere sexual pleasure that fetishizes the body.
According to Pinsky, our fascination with these newer narcissistic role models may seem a mere guilty pleasure, but, he argues, it is a reflection of the deep, primal chord they strike within us, the desire to emulate and then destroy our icons.
For as long as many of us can remember -- if we're serious about reading, that is -- we've sat with paper in hand, staring at symbols to which we, more frequently than not, credit far more than mere abiding pleasure.
Kanhopatra advises against seeking mere sexual pleasure; she speaks of the evils of sexual attraction, citing mythological characters who suffered the consequences of sexual temptation: the demon-king Ravana, the demon Bhasmasura, the god-king of heaven Indra and the moon-god Chandra.
