Quotes About Joy

I think I should have no other mortal wants, if I could always have plenty of music. It seems to infuse strength into my limbs and ideas into my brain. Life seems to go on without effort, when I am filled with music.

To know intense joy without a strong bodily frame, one must have an enthusiastic soul.

My own experience and development deepen every day my conviction that our moral progress may be measured by the degree in which we sympathize with individual suffering and individual joy.

Joy and peace are not resignation: resignation is the willing endurance of a pain that is not allayed – that you don't expect to be allayed. Stupefaction is not resignation: and it is stupefaction to remain in ignorance – to shut up all the avenues by which the life of your fellow-men might become known to you. I am not resigned: I am not sure that life is long enough to learn that lesson. You are not resigned: you are only trying to stupefy yourself.

And there is no better reason for preferring this elderberry bush than that it stirs an early memory, that it is no novelty in my life, speaking to me merely through my present sensibilities to form and colour, but the long companion of my existence that wove itself into my joys when joys were vivid.

So much of our early gladness vanishes utterly from our memory: we can never recall the joy with which we laid our heads on our mother's bosom or rode on our father's back in childhood. Doubtless that joy is wrought up into our nature, as the sunlight of long-past mornings is wrought up in the soft mellowness of the apricot, but it is gone for ever from our imagination, and we can only BELIEVE in the joy of childhood.

What can promote innocent mirth, and I may say virtue, more than a good riddle?

The happiest women, like the happiest nations, have no history.

it is in these acts called trivialities that the seeds of joy are forever wasted, until men and women look round with haggard faces at the devastation their own waste has made, and say, the earth bears no harvest of sweetness--calling their denial knowledge.

The gold had asked that he should sit weaving longer and longer, deafened and blinded more and more to all things except the monotony of his loom and the repetition of his web; but Eppie called him away from his weaving, and made him think all its pauses a holiday, reawakening his senses with her fresh life, even to the old winter-flies that came crawling forth in the early spring sunshine, and warming him into joy because she had joy.

O radiant Dark! O darkly fostered ray! Thou hast a joy too deep for shallow Day.

It is hard to say how much we could forgive ourselves if we were secure from judgment by another whose opinion is the breathing-medium of all our joy—who brings to us with close pressure and immediate sequence that judgment of the Invisible and Universal which self-flattery and the world's tolerance would easily melt and disperse. In this way our brother may be in the stead of God to us, and his opinion which has pierced even to the joints and marrow, may be our virtue in the making.

in a paradise with sweet laughs for bird-notes, and blue eyes for a heaven.

his lips were curled with that incipient smile which is apt to accompany agreeable recollections.

Apparently the mingled thread in the web of their life was so curiously twisted together that there could be no joy without a sorrow coming close upon it.

Her eyes and cheeks were still brightened with her childlike enthusiasm in the dance; her whole frame was set to joy and tenderness; even the coming pain could not seem bitter,–she was ready to welcome it as a part of life, for life at this moment seemed a keen, vibrating consciousness poised above pleasure or pain. This one, this last night, she might expand unrestrainedly in the warmth of the present, without those chill, eating thoughts of the past and the future.

By George Eliot   Let thy chief terror be of thine own soul:   There, 'mid the throng of hurrying desires   That trample on the dead to seize their spoil,   Lurks vengeance, footless, irresistible   As exhalations laden with slow death,   And o'er the fairest troop of captured joys   Breathes pallid pestilence.

Let the music which can take the possession of our frame and fill the air with joy for us, sound once more - what does it signify that we heard it found fault with in its absence?

I will not profess bravery [...] but I acknowledge a good deal of pleasure in fighting.

O father, said Eppie, what a pretty home ours is! I think nobody could be happier than we are.

I felt a sort of pitying anguish over the pathos of my own lot: the lot of a being finely organized for pain, but with hardly any fibres that responded to pleasure — to whom the idea of future evil robbed the present of its joy, and for whom the idea of future good did not still the uneasiness of a present yearning or a present dread.

Nevertheless the joy of being with Dinah would triumph - it was like the influence of climate, which no resistance can overcome.

It is always good to know, if only in passing, charming human beings. It refreshes one like flowers and woods and clear brooks

Like other spiritual fruit, joy must be cultivated.