Happiness and Joy

He is well paid that is well satisfied.

Full nakedness! All joys are due to thee, As souls unbodied, bodies unclothed must be, To taste whole joys.

And pomp, and feast, and revelry, With mask, and antique pageantry, Such sights as youthful poets dream On summer eves by haunted stream. Then to the well-trod stage anon, If Jonson’s learned sock be on, Or sweetest Shakespeare, Fancy’s child, Warble his native wood-notes wild, And ever, against eating cares, Lap me in soft Lydian airs, Married to immortal verse Such as the meeting soul may pierce, In notes with many a winding bout Of linked sweetness long drawn out.

And kind as kings upon their coronation day.

How small, of all that human hearts endure, That part which laws or kings can cause or cure! Still to ourselves in every place consign’d, Our own felicity we make or find.

And solitary places; where we taste The pleasure of believing what we see Is boundless, as we wish our souls to be.

Do you wish to roam farther and farther? See! The Good lies so near. Only learn to seize good fortune, For good fortune’s always here.

Joy is the sweet voice, joy the luminous cloud— We in ourselves rejoice! And thence flows all that charms or ear or sight, All melodies the echoes of that voice, All colors a suffusion from that light.

Rarely, rarely, comest thou, Spirit of Delight!

It is sweet to dance to violins When Love and Life are fair: To dance to flutes, to dance to lutes Is delicate and rare: But it is not sweet with nimble feet To dance upon the air!

When such as I cast out remorse So great a sweetness flows into the breast We must laugh and we must sing, We are blest by everything, Everything we look upon is blest.

How sad and bad and mad it was—

Energy is Eternal Delight.

That is happiness: to be dissolved into something complete and great.

To be able to fill leisure intelligently is the last product of civilization.

Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song,

Total absence of humor renders life impossible.

Be happy. It's one way of being wise.

When someone does something good, applaud! You will make two people happy.

Joy increases as you give it, and diminishes as you try to keep it for yourself. In giving it, you will accumulate a deposit of joy greater than you ever believed possible.

Happiness lies in the joy of achievement and the thrill of creative effort.

It’s a funny thing about life; if you refuse to accept anything but the best, you very often get it.

I like living. I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable, racked with sorrow, but through it all I still know quite certainty that just to be alive is a grand thing.

They are happy men whose natures sort with their vocations.