Joy quotes
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside joy — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"Let thy chief terror be of thine own soul: There, 'mid the throng of hurrying desires That trample o'er the dead to seize their spoil, Lurks vengeance, footless, irresistible As exhaltations laden with slow death, And o'er the fairest troop of captured joys Breathes pallid pestilence."
"... it is one of the gains of advancing age that the good of young creatures becomes a more definite intense joy to us. With that renunciation for ourselves which age inevitably brings, we get more freedom of soul to enter into the life of others; what we can never learn they will know, and the gladness which is a departed sunlight to us is rising with the strength of morning to them."
"To know intense joy without a strong bodily frame, one must have an enthusiastic soul."
"What if in my waking hours a sound should ring through the silent halls of hearing? ... Would the bow and string tension of life snap? Would the heart over weighted with sudden joy stop beating for very excess of happiness?"
"I love my work, and I think that I was so lucky to pick a profession where it's a joy to go to work every day."
"To weepe for joy is a kinde of Manna."
"There's a conflicted look in Day's eyes, a joy and a grief, that makes him so vulnerable. I realize how little defense he has against my words. He loves so wholly. It is his nature."
"But that had been grief--this was joy. Yet that grief and this joy were alike outside all the ordinary conditions of life; they were loopholes, as it were, in that ordinary life through which there came glimpses of something sublime. And in the contemplation of this sublime something the soul was exalted to inconceivable heights of which it had before had no conception, while reason lagged behind, unable to keep up with it."
"He knew she was there by the joy and terror that took possession of his heart [...] Everything was lit up by her. She was the smile that brightened everything around."
"For the atom's soul is nothing but energy. Spirit blazes in the dullest of clay. The life of every woman or man - the heart of it - is pure and holy joy."
"A dead enemy is a joy forever"
"There was an agelessness about him, a stillness; on Roose Bolton's face, rage and joy looked much the same."
"...Ned always said that the man who passes the sentence should swing the blade, though he never took any joy in the duty. But I would, oh, yes."
"Invariably, it is this for which I write: the joy ... of an argument firmly made, like a nail straightly driven, its head flush to the plank."
"But I shall give less thought to the future, I shall work in the present. I feel such work is within my power. For I only succeed in small things, and when I am tried by anxiety, I am bound to say it is the small joys that release me."
"Joy, which was the small publicity of the pagan, is the gigantic secret of the Christian."
"We actually love ourselves more than we love joy."
"Surprise is the secret of joy."
"We do not want joy and anger to neutralize each other and produce a surly contentment; we want a fiercer delight and a fiercer discontent. We have to feel the universe at once as an ogre's castle, to be stormed, and yet as our own cottage, to which we can return to at evening."
"We dance for the pure joy of it. In the kitchen to the record player. Because we've got it in us. All over ... it's not just in the legs. It comes from inside and runs all through you. In waves. From down below to up above. All the way to the scalp."
