Quotes About Joy

I hold my plush monkey over the bannister and let it drop. Its eyes light up when you squeeze its kidneys as whose eyes, I suppose, would not.

The place God calls us to is the place where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet.

Knowing that even though you see only through a glass darkly, even though lots of things happen - wars and peacemaking, hunger and homelessness - joy is knowing, even for a moment, that underneath everything are the everlasting arms.

Sitting there in the Alabama winter with my mouth full of cold turnip and mud, I could see at least for a moment how if you ever took truly to heart the ultimate goodness and joy of things, even at their bleakest, the need to praise someone or something for it would be so great that you might even have to go out and speak of it to the birds of the air.

Frivolous they might be, but the people of Ecbatana at least saw that the world was created for their delight, and as they jumped about in the frigid streams and wasted their money in the crowded bazaars, they came closer to living their lives as the Holy One intended than those who were continually apologizing for their unworthiness and trying to avert the wrath of the One who, had they but known, wishes the world only well.

To find our calling is to find the intersection between our own deep gladness and the world's deep hunger.

My day has been a pleasant one. My joys have far exceeded my sorrows and my friends have brought me far more than my enemies have taken from me.

I admit that the slave does sometimes sing, dance and appear to be merry. But what does this prove? It only proves to my mind, that though slavery is armed with a thousand stings, it is not able entirely to kill the elastic spirit of the bondman.

Welcome, welcome joy, welcome sorrow, welcome pleasure, welcome pain. You are all the ingredients of life -- and with you all, life is an inestimable blessing.

I have often been asked how I felt when first I found myself on free soil. There is scarcely anything in my experience about which I could not give a more satisfactory answer. A new world had opened upon me. If life is more than breath and the "quick round of blood," I lived more in that one day than in a year of my slave life. It was a time of joyous excitement which words can but tamely describe.

I would only believe in a God that wold know how to dance.

Shared joys make a friend, not shared sufferings.

Christmas is not an external event at all, but a piece of one's home that one carries in one's heart.

Nothing is worth more than laughter. It is strength to laugh and to abandon oneself, to be light. Tragedy is the most ridiculous thing.

There is nothing more precious than laughter

And we should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once. And we should call every truth false which was not accompanied by at least one laugh

I would believe only in a God that knows how to dance.

I would only believe in a god who could dance.

Pardon me, my friends, I have ventured to paint my happiness on the wall.

Only great pain, the long, slow pain that takes its time... compels us to descend to our ultimate depths... I doubt that such pain makes us better; but I know it makes us more profound... In the end, lest what is most important remain unsaid: from such abysses, from such severe sickness, one returns newborn, having shed one's skin... with merrier senses, with a second dangerous innocence in joy, more childlike and yet a hundred times subtler than one has ever been before.

The one necessary thing .— A person must have one or the other. Either a cheerful disposition by nature, or a disposition made cheerful by art and knowledge.

Have you ever said Yes to a single joy? O my friends, then you have said Yes too to all woe. All things are entangled, ensnared, enamored; if ever you wanted one thing twice, if ever you said, You please me, happiness! Abide, moment! then you wanted all back. All anew, all eternally, all entangled, ensnared, enamored--oh then you loved the world. Eternal ones, love it eternally and evermore; and to woe too, you say: go, but return! For all joy wants--eternity .

And to me also, who appreciate life, the butterflies, and soap-bubbles, and whatever is like them amongst us, seem most to enjoy happiness.

Behold! I am weary of my wisdom, like the bee that has gathered too much honey; I need hands outstretched to take it from me. I wish to spread it and bestow it, until the wise have once more become joyous in their folly, and the poor happy in their riches.