Joy is not a substitute for sex; sex is very often a substitute for joy. I sometimes wonder whether all pleasures are not substitutes for Joy.
Book: Surprised by Joy (1955)
We’re never so vulnerable than when we trust someone - but paradoxically, if we cannot trust, neither can we find love or joy.
The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware.
Seek what you seek, but it is not where you seek it.
Book: Confessions
Every beginning is mysterious because every beginning has a drop of the exotic perfume of divinity on its garments.
Book: A Companion to the Summa, Vol. I
Life is pain. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.
Movie: Princess Bride
All life isn’t hearts and flowers. I wish it was, God knows I do. But life is just as much pain and mess as it is joy and order. Probably a lot more mess than order, too. I guess when you make yourself realize that, you start growing up.
Book: Boy’s Life
Be joyful, though you have considered all the facts.
Joy of life seems to arise from a sense of being where one belongs, of being four-square with the life we have chosen. All the discontented people I know are trying to be something they are not, to do something they cannot do.
Joy has no parents. No joy ever
learns from the one before, and it dies without heirs.
But sorrow has a long tradition,
handed down from eye to eye, from heart to heart.
learns from the one before, and it dies without heirs.
But sorrow has a long tradition,
handed down from eye to eye, from heart to heart.
Poem: You Can Rely On Him
Realize that true happiness lies within you. Waste no time and effort searching for peace and contentment and joy in the world outside. Remember that there is no happiness in having or in getting, but only in giving. Reach out. Share. Smile. Hug. Happiness is a perfume you cannot pour on others without getting a few drops on yourself.
Joy does not simply happen to us. We have to choose joy and keep choosing it every day. Joy is the experience of knowing that you are unconditionally loved and that nothing—sickness, failure, emotional distress, oppression, war, or even death—can take that love away.
Doing good to others is not a duty. It is a joy, for it increases your own health and happiness.
Each man’s necessary path, though as obscure and apparently uneventful as that of a beetle in the grass, is the way to the deepest joys he is suscptible of; though he converses only with moles and fungi and disgraces his relatives, it is no matter if he knows what is steel to his flint