Quotes About Joy

The Bible talks plentifully about joy, but it nowhere talks about a 'happy Christian.' Happiness depends on what happens; joy does not. Remember, Jesus Christ had joy, and He prayed 'that they might have my joy fulfilled in themselves.'

The joy of the Lord is your strength and the person of Christ is your unassailable joy - and the battle for joy is nothing less than fighting the good fight of faith.

Success is not in obtaining the thing. Because there's always another thing. And then you look back on it, and for me, through my evolution, yes I have success by most measures - but for me, when it comes to the greatest joy of reward, there's an emotional element and there's an intellectual element. Emotionally, my greatest joy was the personal relationships I've had. That was the greatest joy. Intellectually, my satisfaction was that I do feel I've evolved well and I'm doing my best to contribute toward evolution.

There is a purpose in life--to raise men nearer to the likeness of God. Whoever seeks that ideal, daily, finds joy; and in no other way can true joy be found.

In the three minutes it takes the song to play I'm caught in a magic world of harmony and joy, a truly ecstatic joy, where the aching longing to be somewhere else, out of this city, out of this country, out of this body and out of this life, is kept at bay.

So, how can we live in joy - and how can we know that we're supposed to live in joy the way people tell us to - when we're believing thoughts that bring on sadness and frustration and anger and alienation and loneliness? When we're believing those thoughts, we think that's the world, rather than what we're believing about the world. We're like lost little children.

There’s danger in thinking joy is a matter of location. If we can’t find joy where we are, we probably won’t find it anywhere.

Difficult times are the greatest opportunities in disguise. When we face difficult times we have to put in determined work to get ourselves into joy. Difficult times are your greatest opportunity to practice yourself into joy!

Whatever else you do or forbear, impose upon yourself the task of happiness; and now and then abandon yourself to the joy of laughter. And however much you condemn the evil in the world, remember that the world is not all evil; that somewhere children are at play, as you yourself in the old days; that women still find joy in the stalwart hearts of men; And that men, treading with restless feet their many paths, may yet find refuge from the storms of the world in the cheerful house of love.

Outside is the joy of the drop. Inside is the joy of the ocean.

Such tricks hath strong imagination, That, if it would but apprehend some joy, It comprehends some bringer of that joy; Or in the night, imagining some fear, How easy is a bush supposed a bear!

Comparing [our] blessings [with others] is almost certain to drive out joy. We cannot be grateful and envious at the same time. If we truly want to have the Spirit of the Lord and experience joy and happiness, we should rejoice in our blessings and be grateful.

For the time of towns is tolled from the world by funereal chimes, but in nature the universal hours are counted by succeeding tribes of animals and plants, and by growth of joy on joy.

All of us have had the experience of a sudden joy that came when nothing in the world had forewarned us of its coming - a joy so thrilling that if it was born of misery we remembered even the misery with tenderness.

This joy that He brings us transcends every human trial, it is a joy that can strengthen even the weakest of hands

You are at the same time arrogant and self-loathing. You are a puzzle. But the ancient truth remains: as the light grows dimmer, things begin to become harder to see. I came to love you in time, but I feared the dark side as well. I still do. You have tremendous potential, potential for joy or hate, light or dark, life or death. But in the end, you choose. What a gift, what a joy to witness.

A joy shared is a joy doubled.

I know the joy of fishes in the river through my own joy, as I go walking along the same river.

Have you taught a Sunday School class and felt when you finished that you had really taught someone some principle of the gospel that had really helped him or given him a brighter look on life? Remember the feeling of peace and joy that followed? Have you ever taught someone the gospel and received that feeling of joy because he had accepted what you had been teaching? The thrill of missionary work!

God's peace is joy resting. His joy is peace dancing.

The joy of suddenly learning a former secret and the joy of suddenly discovering a hitherto unknown truth are the same to me - both have the flash of enlightenment, the almost incredibly enhanced vision, and the ecstasy and euphoria of released tension.

Style has no formula, but it has a secret key. It is the extension of your personality. The summation of this indefinable net of your feeling, knowledge and experience. Take colour as a totality of relations within a framecolour is joy. One does not think joy. One is carried by it.

Each individual composes the music of his own life. If he injures another, he brings disharmony. When his sphere is disturbed, he is disturbed himself, and there is a discord in the melody of his life. If he can quicken the feeling of another to joy or to gratitude, by that much he adds to his own life; he becomes himself by that much more alive. Whether conscious of it or not, his thought is affected for the better by the joy or gratitude of another, and his power and vitality increase thereby, and the music of his life grows more in harmony.

Joy is there everywhere; it is superfluous, unnecessary; nay, it very often contradicts the most peremptory behests of necessity. It exists to show that the bonds of law can only be explained by love; they are like body and soul. Joy is the realisation of the truth of oneness, the oneness of our soul with the world and of the world-soul with the supreme lover.

I love to think of the whole universe together as one eternal fact. I love to think that everything is alive; that crystallization is itself a step toward joy. I love to think that when a bud bursts into blossom: it feels a thrill. I love to have the universe full of feeling and full of joy, and not full of simple dead, inert matter, managed by an old bachelor for all eternity.

Compassion is sometimes the fatal capacity for feeling what it is like to live inside somebody else's skin. It is the knowledge that there can never really be any peace and joy for me until there is peace and joy finally for you too.

No matter how huge your loss, as long as you remain engaged with your life, the best days of your life may still be ahead of you. Don't misunderstand me: the pain of your loss will remain with you for the rest of your life. But great joy will be there right beside it. Deep sorrow and deep joy can exist within you, side by side. At every moment. And it's not confusing. And it's not a conflict.

Service which is rendered without joy helps neither the servant nor the served. But all other pleasures and possessions pale into nothingness before service which is rendered in a spirit of joy.

At that moment I remembered something Cal had told me: that there is beauty in darkness in everything. Sorrow in joy, life and death, thorns on the rose. I knew then that I could not escape pain and torment any more than I could give up joy and beauty

The poet's expression of joy conceals his despair at not having found the reality of joy.

We cannot count on God to arrange what happens in our lives in ways that will make us feel good.We can, however, count on God to patiently remove all the obstacles to our enjoyment of Him. He is committed to our joy, and we can depend on Him to give us enough of a taste of that joy and enough hope that the best is still ahead to keep us going in spite of how much pain continues to plague our hearts.

Only a fool wants war, but once a war starts then it cannot be fought half-heartedly. It cannot even be fought with regret, but must be waged with a savage joy in defeating the enemy, and it is that savage joy that inspires our bards to write their greatest songs about love and war.

You have a freedom in playing the villain. You can be a lot more out there, really. And there is a joy in that. There is a joy in kind of making a zone of psychoses.

And the true realism, always and everywhere, is that of the poets: to find out where joy resides, and give it a voice far beyond singing. For to miss the joy is to miss all.

True happiness is to rejoice in the truth, for to rejoice in the truth is to rejoice in You, O God, who are the truth... Those who think that there is another kind of happiness look for joy elsewhere, but theirs is not true joy.

Creative people often feel highs of joy and lows of sorrow that others may never experience, and perhaps could not even handle if they did. Little wonder many outside the creative world mistake (or dismiss) eccentric responses of the spirit as weakness or mental illness. But in the end, these dismissive souls will never know what it is to be moved by tears by the beauty of rose or brought to joy by sunlight filtering through the leaves of spring or autumn. The creative walk in glades invisible to those outside their realms.

How happy are the pessimists! What joy is theirs when they have proved there is no joy.

The root of joy is gratefulness...It is not joy that makes us grateful; it is gratitude that makes us joyful.

I see the joy in life and I see the joy in simple things. I over-compliment. I over-praise. I over-express my feelings toward people because I never got it in my family. I am the first to hug somebody, because I wasn't hugged.

The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain... When you are joyous look deep into your heart and you will find that it is only that which has given you sorrow that is giving you joy.

I'm not very comfortable with watching my performances. I don't particularly find a great joy in it. Everything is the process of making it, of getting it, getting the job, saying yes to the job. Those are the joys. Making it is the greatest joy. And then, you have to show the bloody thing. You have to show and tell, be judged. But I don't listen. I don't pay much attention. I hear the rumblings of greatness or the arrows of discontent and harsh words. Then you go, "Oh God. Why?"

Sometimes your joy is the source of your smile, but sometimes your smile can be the source of your joy.

There is a joy available that the deepest grief cannot put out. No circumstance or person can take away the joy God gives.

When I started in the theater, the joy for me was playing different parts, and I get set alight by different people and different worlds. The biggest joy for me is jumping around and going from that to this to that, never feeling that I'm any one thing - because I'm not, and we as people aren't.

He was born in fury and he lived in lightning. Tom came headlong into life. He was a giant in joy and enthusiasms. He didn't discover the world and its people, he created them. When he read his father's books, he was the first. He lived in a world shining and fresh and as uninspected as Eden on the sixth day. His mind plunged like a colt in a happy pasture, and when later the world put up fences, he plunged against the wire, and when the final stockade surrounded him, he plunged right through it and out. And as he was capable of giant joy, so did he harbor huge sorrow.

It's such a joy to be able to play someone who is angry. It's a joy and a relief.

Indeed, the opposite of joy is not sorrow. The opposite of joy is unbelief.

When I write, I tend toward melancholy, and the few times that I've tried pure joy in music, it doesn't really work that well. The joy can be through catharsis. I think that's what I do well, and observation.