Happiness and Joy

We are noble, good, beautiful, and happy!

While money can't buy happiness, it certainly lets you choose your own form of misery.

What if pleasure and displeasure were so tied together that whoever wanted to have as much as possible of one must also have as much as possible of the other. You have a choice in life: either as little displeasure as possible, painlessness in brief or as much displeasure as possible as the price for an abundance of subtle pleasures and joys

To do something, say something, seesomething, before anybody else—these are things that confer a pleasure compared with which other pleasures are tame and commonplace, other ecstasies cheap and trivial.

Gem of all joy, jasper of jocundity.

 

If you evade suffering you also evade the chance of joy. Pleasure you may get, or pleasures, but you will not be fulfilled. You will not know what it is to come home.

What we have to discover is that there is no safety, that seeking is painful, and that when we imagine that we have found it, we don’t like it.

Let your joy be unconfined!

The young are permanently in a state resembling intoxication.

Life must be lived as play.

’Tis not the balm, the scepter and the ball, The sword, the mace, the crown imperial, The intertissued robe of gold and pearl, The farced title running ’fore the king, The throne he sits on, nor the tide of pomp That beats upon the high shore of this world, No, not all these, thrice-gorgeous ceremony, Not all these, laid in bed majestical, Can sleep so soundly as the wretched slave, Who with a body fill’d and vacant mind Gets him to rest, cramm’d with distressful bread.

I count myself in nothing else so happy As in a soul remembering my good friends.

Some there be that shadows kiss; Such have but a shadow’s bliss.

Happy the man, and happy he alone, He who can call today his own; He who, secure within, can say, Tomorrow, do thy worst, for I have liv’d today.

Such sober certainty of waking bliss.

As Tammie glow’red, amazed, and curious, The mirth and fun grew fast and furious.

Fire from the mind as vigor from the limb; And life’s enchanted cup but sparkles near the brim.

Man, being reasonable, must get drunk; The best of life is but intoxication.

Which is the bliss of solitude.

And honored among foxes and pheasants by the gay house Under the new-made clouds and happy as the heart was long, I ran my heedless ways.

Oh! who can ever be tired of Bath?

Exuberance is beauty.

Piping down the valleys wild,

On with the dance! let joy be unconfined;