Great Throughts Treasury

"Skill's a joy to any man." - John Masefield

"The experience of life nearly always works toward the confirmation of faith. It is the total significance of life that it reveals God to man; and life only can do this; neither thought, nor demonstration, nor miracle, but only life, weaving its threads of daily toil and trial and joy into a pattern on which, at last, is inscribed the name of "God."" - Theodore T. Munger

"Song is man's sweetest joy." - Musaeus NULL

"Do things that bring you sense of fulfillment, joy, and purpose, that validate your worth. See your life as your own creation, and strive to make it a positive one." - People with AIDS Coalition NULL

"Religion without joy - it is no religion." - Joseph Parker

"The acceptance of truth that joy and sorrow, laughter and tears are not confined to any particular time, place or people, but are universally distributed, should make us more tolerant of and more interested in the lives of others." - William M. Peck

"Religion should be the motor of life, the central heating plant of personality, the faith that gives joy to activity, hope to struggle, dignity to humility, zest to living." - William Lyon Phelps

"Sorrows remembered sweeten present joy." - Robert Pollok

"Make not another's misfortune your joy." - Publius Syrus

"The finest fruit of serious learning should be the ability to speak the word God without reserve or embarrassment. And it should be spoken without adolescent resentment, rather with some sense of communion, with reverence and with joy." - Nathan Marsh Pusey

"We do not marvel at the sunrise of a joy, only at its sunset! Then, on the other hand, we are amazed at the commencement of a sorrow-storm; but that it should go off in gentle showers, we think quite natural." -

"Different religions are only signposts. In all religions the basic tenets are joy and compassion." - Shantananda Saraswathi, fully Swami Shantananda Saraswathi, born Chandrashekar

"Brief is sorrow, and endless is joy." - Friedrich Schiller, fully Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller

"True joy is a serene and sober motion; and they are miserably out that take laughing for rejoicing; the seat of it is within, and there is no cheerfulness like the resolutions of a brave mind." -

"What madness is it for a man to starve himself to enrich his heir, and so turn a friend into an enemy! For his joy at your death will be proportioned to what you leave him." -

"Never did any soul do good but it came readier to do the same again, with more enjoyment. Never was love with more enjoyment. Never was love or gratitude or bounty practiced but with increasing joy, which made the practicer still more in love with the fair act." - Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury

"Healing is simply attempting to do more of those things that bring joy and fewer of those things that bring pain." - O. Carl Simonton

"As all before me, I have questioned, grateful for the privilege of being able to ask: What is my task? Why do we exist? All answers produce the pain of recognition, emptiness and joy." - Patti Smith, fully Patricia Lee "Patti" Smith

"Love is nothing but joy accompanied with the idea of an eternal cause, and hatred is nothing but sorrow with the accompanying idea of an external cause..." -

"The desire which springs from joy, other things being equal, is strong than that which springs from sorrow." -

"An aspiration is a joy for ever, a possession as solid as a landed estate, a fortune which we can never exhaust and which gives us year by year a revenue of pleasure activity." - Robert Louis Stevenson, fully Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson

"Art postulates communion, and the other artist has an imperative need to make others share the joy which he experiences himself." - Igor Feodorovitch Stravinsky, or Fyodorovich

"I find my joy of living in the fierce and ruthless battles of life, and my pleasure comes from learning something." - Johan August Strindberg

"I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted and behold, service was joy." -

"Love adorns itself; it seeks to prove inward joy by outward beauty." -

"The current of the world has its boundaries, otherwise it could have no existence, but its purpose is not shown in the boundaries which restrain it, but in its movement, which is toward perfection. The wonder is not that there should be obstacles and sufferings in this world, but that there should be law and order, beauty and joy, goodness and love." -

"The picture of a flower in a botanical book is information; its mission ends with our knowledge. But in pure art it is a personal communication. And therefore until it finds its harmony in the depth of our personality it misses the mark. We can treat existence solely as a textbook furnishing us lessons, and we shall not be disappointed, but we know that there its mission does not end. For in our joy in it, which is an end in itself, we feel that it is a communication, the final response of our knowing but the response of our being." -

"Things in which we do not take joy are either a burden upon our minds to be got rid of at any cost; or they are useful, and therefore in temporary and partial relation to us, becoming burdensome when their utility is lost; or they are like wandering vagabonds, loitering for a moment on the outskirts of our recognition, and then passing on. A thing is only completely our own when it is a thing of joy to us." -

"When we rejoice in our fullness, then we can part with out fruits with joy." -

"Every man rejoices twice when he has a partner of his joy; a friend shares my sorrow and makes it but a moiety, but he swells my joy and makes it double." - Jeremy Taylor

"Life is a place of service, and in that service one has to suffer a great deal that is hard to bear, but more often to experience a great deal of joy. But that joy can be real only if people look upon their life as a service, and have a definite object in life outside themselves and their personal happiness." -

"Few and precious are the words which the lips of Wisdom utter. To what shall their rarity be likened? What price shall count their worth? Perfect and much to be desired, and giving joy with riches, no lovely thing on earth can picture all their beauty." -

"Grief can take care of itself, but to get the full value of joy, you must have somebody to divide it with." -

"If we find fullness of joy in the thought that God exists, we should find the same fullness in the knowledge that we ourselves do not exist for it is the same thought." - Simone Weil

"Science is an important part of the humanities because it is based on an essential human trait: curiosity about the how and why of our environment. We must foster wonder, joy of insight." - Victor Weisskopf, fully Victor "Viki" Frederick Weisskopf

"Man, being essentially active, must find in activity his joy, as well as his beauty and glory; and labor, like everything else that is good, is its own reward." - Edwin Percy Whipple

"Beauty is the only thing that time cannot harm. Philosophies fall away like sand, and creeds follow one another like the withered leaves of Autumn; but what is beautiful is a joy for all seasons and a possession for all eternity." -

"With an eye made quiet by the power of harmony, and the deep power of joy, we see into the life of things." - William Wordsworth

"The soul of one who serves God always swims in joy, always keeps a holiday, is always in her palace of jubilation, ever singing with fresh ardor and fresh pleasure a new song of joy and love." - John Yepes “Saint John of the Cross”

"Cares are employments; and without employ the soul is on a rack; the rack of rest, to souls most adverse; action all their joy." - Edward Young

"Our task as we grow older in a rapidly advancing science, is to retain the capacity of joy in discoveries which correct older ideas, and to learn from our pupils as we teach them." - Hans Zinnser

"Even on the path to God, All is God. You are freed from your own desires only when God frees you. This is not effected by your own exertion, but by the grace of God... Then you entirely recognize that you do not have the right to say “I” or “mine.” At this stage you behold your helplessness; desires fall away from you and you become free and calm. You desire what God desires; your own desires are gone, you are emancipated from your wants, and I have gained peace and joy in both worlds. First, action is necessary, then knowledge, in order that you may know that you know nothing and are no one. This is not easy to know. It is a thing that cannot be rightly learned by instruction, nor sewed on with needle nor tied on with thread. It is the gift of God." -

"No man truly has joy unless he lives in love." - Saint Thomas Aquinas, aka Thomas of Aquin or Aquino, Doctor Angelicus, Doctor Communis or Doctor Universalis

"After rain comes sunshine; after darkness comes the glorious dawn. There is no sorrow without its alloy of joy, there is no joy without its admixture of sorrow. Behind the ugly terrible mask of misfortune lies the beautiful soothing countenance of prosperity. So, tear the mask!" - Obafemi Awolowo, fully Jeremiah Obafemi Awolowo, commonly known as Awo

"The time we spend on earth is but one tick of the eternal clock in an unending eternity. We are here in mortality for a brief moment and then on to the next stage of our development. It does not matter how many trials we have in life, just how we handle them. It does not matter how long we live, just how we live. How can we appreciate eternal good health if we have never experienced sickness, pain, or disease? How can we appreciate eternal joy if we have never experienced disappointment, hardship, or failure? How can we appreciate living forever if we have never known death?" - Phil Batchelor

"If men but saw the hand of death impending over their heads, even food would give no joy, much less the deeds that are not right." - Bhoja NULL

"I cannot believe that the inscrutable universe turns on an axis of suffering; surely the strange beauty of the world must somewhere rest on pure joy!" - Louise Bogan

"There is, above all, the laughter that comes from the eternal joy of creation, the joy of making the world new, the joy of expressing the inner riches of the soul - laughter from triumphs over pain and hardship in the passion for an enduring ideal, the joy of bringing the light of happiness, of truth and beauty into a dark world. This is divine laughter par excellence." - John Elof Boodin

"To be human is to long for something more, something beyond us. Fulfillment, peace, and lasting happiness, for no apparent reason, seem to have evaded us. We believe that we are meant for happiness and made for joy. Pain and suffering are somehow a mistake that should not be part of life." - Joe Boot

"Charity from the heart brings joy." -