joy

Joy is the wild card of life; it supersedes every other formula for success.
If you can find a way to create joy, you can rise beyond all external factors.
If you can play at whatever you are doing, you are the master of your life.

Alan Cohen

Joy is the characteristic by which God uses us to re-make the distressing
into the desired, the discarded into the creative.  Joy is prayer--
Joy is strength--Joy is love--Joy is a net of love by which you can catch souls.

Mother Teresa

When I look at the sky, the trees, the land or into the eyes of someone I love,
I experience the wonder of life. Noticing the simple blessings that surround me
here and now, I tap into my inner wellspring of joy.  One joyful thought starts
a chain reaction, just as the song of a bird at dawn invites others to join in
I choose to cultivate joy, to count my blessings and to share this feeling with
others.  A joyous state of mind opens me to divine ideas and substance.
I see new ways to express my potential and new opportunities
to experience life as a joyful child of God.

unattributed (Daily Word)

When we align our thoughts, emotions, and actions
with the highest part of ourselves, we are filled with enthusiasm,
purpose, and meaning . . . . We are joyously and intimately engaged
with our world.  This is the experience of authentic power.

Gary Zukav

Joys come from simple and natural things:
mists over meadows, sunlight on leaves,
the path of the moon over water.

Sigurd F. Olson

Joy seems to me a step beyond happiness—happiness is a sort
of atmosphere you can live in sometimes when you’re lucky.
Joy is a light that fills you with hope and faith and love.

Adela Rogers St. Johns

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

Thich Nhat Hanh

Leon Bloy

Joy of life seems to me to arise from a sense of being where one belongs. . .
of being foursquare with the life we have chosen.  All the discontented people
I know are trying sedulously to be something they are not,
to do something they cannot do.

David Grayson

There is no need to ever wait for joy.  My joy does not depend on reaching or
achieving certain goals.  I don't have to graduate from college to feel joy, nor do
I need to be married to feel joy.  I needn't postpone my joy until I've retired or
reached a certain level of success.  Joy is a state of mind, arising from realization
and gratitude, accessible to me at all times.  I never wait for joy.
I choose joy in this very moment.

unattributed (Daily Word)

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Listen to the clues.  The next time you feel real joy, stop and think.
Pay attention.  Because joy's the universe's way of knocking
on your mind's door.  Hello in there.  Is anyone home?  Can I leave a message?
Yes?  Good!  The message is that you are happy, and that means
that you are in touch with your purpose.

Steve Chandler

People need joy quite as much as they need clothing.
Some of them need it far more.

Margaret Collier Graham

The beating heart of the universe is holy joy.

Martin Buber

Once as we were sitting together in a doctor's office, awaiting the lab results
of her six-month chemotherapy checkup, I had asked her about her joy in life.
Her own life had been so hard.  Didn't she feel envious of others who had
things she did not?  She had smiled at the thought and shaken her head.  "Then
what is your secret?" I had asked her, laughing.  Suddenly serious, she had
replied that it seemed to her that joy was not something personal.  When I looked
at her, baffled, she explained she has found that if you are genuinely happy for them,
people are very generous with their joy and share it with you openheartedly.
"When something good happens to the person next to me, I am there to celebrate
it with them.  Their good luck makes me feel lucky.  I rejoice with them about it
as fully as if it was happening to me," she told me.  "It makes me really happy."
She paused and looked thoughtful.  "Of course, then it is happening to me,"
she said with a grin.

Rachel Naomi Remen

Even rain and wind and stormy clouds bring joy,
just as knowing animals and flowers and where they live.

Sigurd F. Olson

I need to learn.  Joy is at the heart of God's plan for human beings.  The reason for
this is worth pondering awhile:  Joy is at the heart of God himself.  We will never
understand the significance of joy in human life until we understand its importance
to God.  I suspect that most of us seriously underestimate God's capacity for joy.

John Ortberg

To miss out on joy is to miss out on the reason for your existence.

Lewis Smedes

If we are to extract any joy out of our span, we must think
and plan and make things better not only for ourselves but for others,
since joy for ourselves depends upon our joy in others and theirs in us.

Theodore Dreiser

There are thousands of books on the joy of gardening
and cooking. Alas, there are only few on the joy of living.

Robert Muller

You have to sniff out joy, keep your nose to the joy-trail.

Buffy Sainte-Marie

I certainly wasn't happy.  Happiness has to do with
reason, and only reason earns it.  What I was given
was the thing you can't earn, and can't keep, and
often don't recognize at the time; I mean joy.

Ursula K. LeGuin