Great Throughts Treasury

"Nothing will supply the want of sunshine to peaches and, to make knowledge valuable you must have the cheerfulness of wisdom. Whenever you are sincerely pleased you are nourished. The joy of the spirit indicates its strength. All healthy things are sweet-tempered. Genius works in sport, and goodness smiles to the last." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Of cheerfulness, or a good temper - the more it is spent, the more of it remains." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

"One more royal trait properly belongs to the poet. I mean his cheerfulness, without which no man can be a poet, for beauty is his aim. He loves virtue, not for its obligation, but for its grace; he delights in the world, in man, in woman, for the lovely light that sparkles from them. Beauty, the spirit of joy and hilarity, he sheds over the universe." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

"To make knowledge valuable, you must have the cheerfulness of wisdom." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

"So of cheerfulness, or a good temper, the more it is spent, the more it remains." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Health is the condition of wisdom, and the sign is cheerfulness, - an open and noble temper." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Of cheerfulness or a good temper - the more it is spent, the more of it remains." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Be cheerful: do not brood over fond hopes unrealized until a chain is fastened on each thought and wound around the heart. Nature intended you to be the fountain-spring of cheerfulness and social life, and not the mountain of despair and melancholy" - Arthur Helps, fully Sir Arthur Helps

"There is no greater every-day virtue than cheerfulness. This quality in man among men is like sunshine to the day or gentle renewing moisture to parched herbs. The light of a cheerful face diffuses itself, and communicates the happy spirit that inspires it. The sourest temper must sweeten in the atmosphere of continuous good humor." - Thomas Carlyle

"Wondrous is the strength of cheerfulness, altogether past calculation its powers of endurance." - Thomas Carlyle

"Give us, oh, give us, the man who sings at his work! He will do more in the same time, he will do it better, he will persevere longer. One is scarcely sensible of fatigue whilst he marches to music. The very stars said to make harmony as they revolve in their spheres. Wondrous is the strength of cheerfulness, altogether past calculation in its powers of endurance. Efforts, to be permanently useful, must be uniformly joyous, a spirit all sunshine, graceful from very gladness, beautiful because bright." - Thomas Carlyle

"Cheerfulness in doing renders a deed more acceptable." - Thomas Fuller

"The happiness life consists, like the day, not in single flashes of light, but in one continuous mild serenity. The most beautiful period of the heart's existence is in this calm, equable light, even although it be only moonshine or twilight. Now the mind alone can obtain for us this heavenly cheerfulness and peace." - Jean Paul, born Johann Paul Friedrich Richter, aka Jean Paul Richter

"Cheerfulness is a very great help in fostering the virtue of charity. Cheerfulness itself is a virtue." - Lawrence G. Lovasik

"A man’s cheerfulness is a measure of his faith. " - Patañjali NULL

"Pure religion may generally be measured by the cheerfulness of its professors, and superstition by the gloom of its victims." - Paul Chatfield, pseudonym for Horace Smith

"The man who finds that in the course of his life he has done a lot of wrong often wakes up at night in terror, like a child with a nightmare, and his life is full of foreboding: but the man who is conscious of no wrongdoing is filled with cheerfulness and hope." - Plato NULL

"Being forced to work, and forced to do your best, will breed in you temperance and self-control, diligence and strength of will, cheerfulness and content, and a hundred virtues which the idle will never know." - Charles Kingsley

"Happiness can only be achieved by looking inward & learning to enjoy whatever life has and this requires transforming greed into gratitude." - John Chrysostom, fully Saint John Chrysostom

"The true, strong, and sound mind is the mind that can embrace equally great things and small." - Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson

"Are you ready to give your very life, so dear to you are the young people entrusted to you?" - Jean Baptiste Lacordaire, fully Jean Baptiste Henri Lacordaire

"The dust goes to its place, and man to his own. - It is then I feel my immortality. - I look through the grave into heaven. - I ask no miracle, no proof, no reasoning, for me. - I ask no risen dust to teach me immortality. - I am conscious of eternal life." - Theodore Parker

"One's-self I sing, a simple separate person, yet utter the word Democratic, the word En-Masse. Of physiology from top to toe I sing, not physiognomy alone nor brain alone is worthy for the Muse, I say the Form complete is worthier far, the Female equally with the Male I sing. Of Life immense in passion, pulse, and power, cheerful, for freest action form'd under the laws divine, the Modern Man I sing." - Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman

"By indulging this fretful temper you alienate those on whose affection much of your comfort depends." - Hugh Blair

"Age is a very high price to pay for maturity." - William James

"The perfect stillness of the night was thrilled by a more solemn silence. The darkness held a presence that was all the more felt because it was not seen. I could not any more have doubted that HE was there than that I was. Indeed, I felt myself to be, if possible, the less real of the two." - William James

"The squalid cash interpretation put on the word success — is our national disease." - William James

"The war against war is going to be no holiday excursion or camping party. The military feelings are too deeply grounded to abdicate their place among our ideals until better substitutes are offered than the glory and shame that come to nations as well as individuals from the ups and downs of politics and the vicissitudes of trade." - William James

"Thus, when a superior intellect and a psychopathic temperament coalesce...in the same individual, we have the best possible conditions for the kind of effective genius that gets into the biographical dictionaries. Such men do not remain mere critics and understanders with their intellect. Their ideas possess them, they inflict them, for better or worse, upon their companions or their age." - William James