Joy

"The secret to happiness is elusive because it is a paradoxical truth. To gain happiness, you must first cease pursuing it. Things perceived to provide happiness are like shiny, pretty bubbles that lure us this way and that way, chasing after their glossy buoyancy. But once they are handled, they “pop”—empty—vanishing along with the hope that happiness could ever be captured. Happiness cannot be caught or won or purchased or even handled. Happiness simply forms like a rainbow in the kindest and most grateful hearts."

"I already know sorrow. Today I choose joy."

"Sixty years is too brief a compass for man’s imagination. The incomplete joys of this world can never satisfy his heart."

"May your life be filled with more gratitude."

"Our true joy is like those sunglasses we’ve been looking for all over, suddenly realizing they’ve been propped on our head during our entire search. They’re already there, quietly waiting for us to reach up and realize they were never lost at all."

"But joy is individual, and can only be experienced alone. Hell is communal, but Heaven is personal."

"One lesson I've learned--worry doesn't change tomorrow, it only robs today of its joy."-Charley"

"Finding our joy requires no leaping. It only wishes we’d opt for being lifted."

"He learned to trust the Father when circumstances seemed hopeless. Christ used the tool of adversity to forge radiant joy in his spirit."

"I don’t remember now who took the photo of us, but I’ve had it in my room for years. We’re leaning out of our windows and we’re laughing at each other with joyfulness purer than anything to do with the polite smiling you get used to doing when you get older. The photo has the kind of proper smiles that happen when you’re looking straight into the face of someone who’s been your best friend for a long time."

"Nothing can come of nothingness, the granthi had said. So to know joy, compassion, sympathy - to feel love - means also to have in the world their opposites."

"Nienor ran on into the woods until she was spent, and then fell, and slept, and awoke; and it was a sunlit morning, and she rejoiced in light as it were a new thing, and all things else that she saw seemed new and strange, for she had no names for them."

"Joy cannot be confused with the mere absence sorrow, misinterpreted as experiencing minimal despair, or misunderstood as living without crippling trepidation. Bliss necessarily encompasses uncompromising acceptance of life’s defining permutations. Emotional harmony necessitates beholding the pleasant and unpleasant exigencies of life while expressing unstinting appreciation for the ordinary and the extraordinary events in our lives. Joyfulness transcends the variations in physical and emotional demands exerted upon us. Elation for life allows us to rise above environmental determinates and associated stresses that might otherwise vex our souls including death and other sorrowful events."

"Happiness simply forms like a rainbow in the kindest and most grateful hearts."

"We each want nothing more than to live for the moment. Nature hardwired us perpetually to follow the call of the wild, cull all the highs in life, and rejoice in life by dancing, singing, jumping, building nests, creating beauty, and playing with our young. We each find ourselves happiest when we are engaging in conduct that makes us feel alive."

"Joy is inexplicable peace that comes from within."

"If God could run out of grace, He would’ve for me by now. And yet every morning I wake up, He says, “There is more, there is still more."

"When we inhabit our own life—stop doing things based on the approval of others—we offload baggage and trade up to joy!"

"Doing something for the mere joy of it—for one's self or others—is quite possibly one of the best returns on an investment of time that a person can receive."

"Joy always follows on the heels of pain. If a person escapes a mindset that current events represent an ongoing tragedy, they will encounter and comprehend all the beauty that surrounds them. We find bliss by living alertly and unequivocally accepting whatever is occurring in the present moment. If a person realizes that the present moment is all that matters, they will gain an inner stillness and appreciate the beauty and joy of each day."