Quotes About Joy

glad to be living. If this is a vice, then we wish no virtue.

I have, let's say, sixty years to live. Most of that time will be spent working. I've chosen the work I want to do. If I find no joy in it, then I'm only condemning myself to sixty years of torture.

La felicidad es un estado de alegría no contradictoria, una alegría sin pena ni culpa, una alegría que no choca con ninguno de tus valores y que no te lleva a tu propia destrucción; no es la alegría de escapar de tu mente, sino la de usar su poder total; no es la alegría de disimular la realidad, sino la de alcanzar valores reales; no es la alegría de un borracho, sino la de un productor.

Love is the expression of one's values, the greatest reward you can earn for the moral qualities you have achieved in your character and person, the emotional price paid by one man for the joy he receives from the virtues of another.

El amor es la expresión de los propios valores, la mayor recompensa a obtener por las cualidades morales conseguidas gracias a vuestro carácter y personalidad, el precio emocional pagado por un hombre a cambio de la alegría recibida por las virtudes de otro.

Ese muchacho es vulnerable. Posee demasiada capacidad para el placer. ¿Qué hará en un mundo donde existen tan raras ocasiones de dicha?

La felicidad sólo es posible al hombre racional, al hombre que sólo desea objetivos racionales, busca valores racionales y halla su goce en la ejecución de actos racionales.

achieving life is not the equivalent of avoiding death. Joy is not 'the absence of pain,' intelligence is not 'the absence of stupidity,' light is not 'the absence of darkness,' an entity is not 'the absence of a nonentity.

He never felt loneliness except when he was happy.

Love and friendship are profoundly personal, selfish values: love is an expression and assertion of self-esteem, a response to one's own values in the person of another. One gains a profoundly personal, selfish joy from the mere existence of the person one loves. It is one's own personal, selfish happiness that one seeks, earns and derives from love.

She nodded silently, unable to name as joy any part of the things she felt.

Again and again as we discussed Lolita in that class, our discussions were colored by my students' hidden personal sorrows and joys. Like tearstains on a letter, these forays into the hidden and the personal shaded all our discussions of Nabokov. And more and more I thought of that butterfly; what linked us so closely was this perverse intimacy of victim and jailer.

This is how I read Lolita. Again and again as we discussed Lolita in that class, our discussions were colored by my students' hidden personal sorrows and joys. Like tearstains on a letter, these forays into the hidden and the personal shaded all our discussions of Nabokov. And more and more I thought of that butterfly; what linked us so closely was this perverse intimacy of victim and jailer.

I went about my way rejoicing, thinking how wonderful it is to be a woman and a writer at the end of the twentieth century.

In my daughters I see her every day, her joy, her capacity for wonder. I won't try to describe how deeply I mourn her passing still. I know that she was the kindest, most generous spirit I have ever known, and that what is best in me I owe to her.

I'd never once heard her dwell on the disappointments. Instead she seemed to find small pleasures everywhere.

Every parent savors such moments, I suppose, when the world slows down, your strivings get pushed to the back of your mind, and all that matters is that you are present, fully, to witness the miracle of your child growing up.

Many of us seem to live our lives looking for happiness. That is not always a bad thing, but it can be if we continually believe that happiness is someplace else and not in the present.

Love is a force more formidable than any other. It is invisible - it cannot be seen or measured, yet it is powerful enough to transform you in a moment, and offer you more joy than any material possession could.

I sometimes believe that the ability to survive on the memory of joy—or to transmit it—is the quality that most clearly separates the human from the beast.

Thanks for this day, for all birds safe in their nests, for whatever this is, for life.

If you want sweet dreams, you've got to live a sweet life.

One of the very first things I figured out about life...is that it's better to be a hopeful person than a cynical, grumpy one, because you have to live in the same world either way, and if you're hopeful, you have more fun.

Sometimes a good day lasts all about 10 seconds.