Happiness and Joy

Freude, schöner Götterfunken,

 

Sleep not, dream not; this bright day Will not, cannot last for aye; Bliss like thine is bought by years Dark with torment and with tears.

 

How fares it with the happy dead?

 

Pain is short, and joy is eternal.

 

Joy, thou spark from Heav’n immortal, Daughter of Elysium! Drunk with fire, toward Heaven advancing Goddess, to thy shrine we come. Thy sweet magic brings together What stern Custom spreads afar; All men become brothers Where thy happy wing-beats are. 1

 

Gem of all joy, jasper of jocundity.

 

The clouds above us join and separate, The breeze in the courtyard leaves and returns. Life is like that, so why not relax? Who can stop us from celebrating?

My heart leaps up when I behold

Resistance is the secret of joy!

There are those who believe Black people possess the secret of joy and that it is this that will sustain them through any spiritual or moral or physical devastation.

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.

The world is so full of a number of things,

Happiness lies in the consciousness we have of it.

I believe the right question to ask, respecting all ornament, is simply this: Was it done with enjoyment—was the carver happy while he was about it?

I have a predilection for painting that lends joyousness to a wall.

Drink and dance and laugh and lie,

Love is the most fun you can have without laughing.

I want, by understanding myself, to understand others. I want to be all that I am capable of becoming. . . . This all sounds very strenuous and serious. But now that I have wrestled with it, it’s no longer so. I feel happy—deep down.

If what Proust says is true, that happiness is the absence of fever, then I will never know happiness. For I am possessed by a fever for knowledge, experience, and creation.

If your morals make you dreary, depend on it, they are wrong.

The true object of all human life is play.

The greatest happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved - loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves.

To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children...to leave the world a better place...to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.

We can have in life but one great experience at best, and the secret of life is to reproduce that experience as often as possible.